


Fed, Forgiven, and Known Again

by Zetared



Series: The Prodigal Series [2]
Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, F/F, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Other, Panic Attacks, Polyamory Negotiations, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-14
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-11-18 02:41:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 42,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18111605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zetared/pseuds/Zetared
Summary: “I think I’m going crazy,” Peg admits, voice muffled.“Welcome to the club. I always knew you’d join eventually.”





	Fed, Forgiven, and Known Again

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you all for your patience. This installment of this series was...difficult, to say the least. 
> 
> This work has been put together, piecemeal, over the course of months and probably has not been proofread nearly as often as it needed--any errors and issues and plot holes are my bad, and I hope you can enjoy, regardless.

It’s not difficult to acquire a larger bed, though it takes some readjustment of the other furniture to leave enough room around the mattress in which to move. BJ jokes about just filling the whole of the master bedroom’s floor with mattresses, but Peg shoots him down, claiming that finding enough blankets and sheets to cover them all would leave them destitute. 

More often than not, Hawkeye sleeps in the middle. A few months into their new arrangement, Erin wanders into their bedroom--rendered clingy and vulnerable by the crack of the thunderstorm passing overhead--and Hawkeye sits up and tries to leave, scooting himself down toward the foot of the bed to escape the tender, familial moment. Peg grabs one of his shoulders and BJ grabs the other, holding him still. “Come here, Bunny,” Peg yawns to Erin, pulling her daughter to her with her free arm. They all four cram into the bed like sardines in a tin that night, but no one minds much. It works for them, their family. They’ve learned quickly how to make room for one another.

\--

Peg must look a sight, a lone island surrounded by a sea of opened letters. She tuts softly under her breath, muttering to herself as she moves from one discarded envelope to another. She picks up one tri-folded stack of papers and breezes through the first few lines only to shake her head and throw them aside. Not there, not there, not _there_.

“Hey, good-looking. What’s cooking?”

Peg stills like a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar. Slowly, avoiding the eyes of her watcher, she lowers the letter in her hand to rest, innocuous, in her lap. “Oh. Nothing.”

Hawkeye’s gaze sweeps across the floor. Pointedly, he takes another bite of the rosy red apple in his hand, seemingly satisfied by the wet-sounding crunch. He doesn’t bother to swallow before replying. “Uh-huh. Looks like nothing. You lose something?”

 _Only my mind_ , Peg thinks, bitterly. “Nothing important.”

Hawkeye steps gingerly into the room, crouching down. He reaches for one of the opened letters, but stops when Peg cries out. “Oh! Your hands are all sticky. Don’t.”

Obediently, Hawkeye pulls back. “Sorry.” He looms over the letter instead, turning his head comically to read the upside-down text. “Letters from Korea, huh?”

“Yes.”

Hawkeye stands up. He disappears briefly into the bathroom, returning with freshly washed hands and no half-eaten apple in sight. He holds a hand out to her. It pleases her to see the healthy, undamaged digits, even all these months on. He still trembles, sometimes, but only when he’s nervous--a state of being that hits him less and less with each passing day. He’s healing, here, and it warms her heart. “Can I see them, now?”

Peg sighs, giving her fingers an obliging twitch toward his own in assent. “Knock yourself out.”

Hawkeye pulls up a letter at random. She watches his eyes dart rapidly as he reads. He smiles. “I always figured it was probably BJ pulling all those pranks on the camp. Everyone suspected me, but, honestly, I couldn’t have come up with half of it. God, those were the best few weeks of my life, over there. A laugh a minute, even though it ended up being at my expense a few times.”

Peg just nods. She sits back, hugging her knees to her chest, the picture of misery. 

Hawkeye doesn’t look up from the letter. “So, what’s wrong?” he asks, with a forced, casual air. 

“I think I’m going crazy,” Peg admits, voice muffled by the cushion of her arms, where she rests her chin. Her eyes focus on Hawkeye’s feet. They are bare, and his toenails need clipped. Men.

“Welcome to the club. I always knew you’d join eventually.” When she doesn’t at least smile at the gibe, Hawkeye frowns and finally pulls his full attention away from the years-old letter. He sits beside her, careful not to squish any of the precious envelopes. “All right, Peggy. Spill. Remember, this is a triangle of truth.”

Peg snorts. It’s a dumb line with a kernel of accuracy, these days. They’ve all three worked hard from the beginning to be upfront with each other. It’s the only way to make their kind of arrangement work. All three of them struggle, in their own ways, to be so open and forthright in the face of domestic difficulties, but still they do their best. What they have built here is worth the potential discomfort. This is what Peg reminds herself of as she slowly looks up from the contemplation of Hawkeye’s feet. 

“It just came to me, all the sudden. I was thinking about the letters, and I remembered I also had a few from you--our exchange to set up the anniversary video for BJ, remember? And then I just…” she shakes her head. “But I was wrong. Strange, wishful thinking. I don’t know why it upsets me so much. It doesn’t even matter, considering how we all are now.”

“I know you think that you’re speaking in coherent sentences, but all I’m getting out of it is riddles. And, between you and me, I’ve never been very good at those--I mean, ‘why _is_ a raven like a writing desk’?”

Peg offers him a weak smile. “‘Edgar Allan Poe wrote on both.’”

Hawkeye’s eyes widen, brows rising comically high. He’s teasing her. “Is that really the answer? Ugh, that’s terrible.”

“It’s the letters,” Peg says, trying to explain herself more clearly. “I’m upset because for a moment I thought that I had more than just the two of them from you.”

Hawkeye gives nothing away with his expression. “What makes you think that?”

“I’m not sure. Nothing specific. I just was reading them, and it hit me that you...well, you shape your vowels very oddly, you know. It’s hard to miss.”

“Madam, I protest. My vowels are just as regular as anyone else’s. I drink a glass of prune juice every day.”

Peg shakes her head. “They aren’t. Your ‘a’s’ look squished down like someone stepped on them, and your ‘u’s’ sometimes get too aggressive and start to look like ‘v’s’ instead. You have very terrible, very unique handwriting, even for a surgeon.”

Hawkeye frowns, puzzling over this assessment of his penmanship. “I think I’m insulted.”

“Hawkeye,” Peg presses. “Did you write to me more than just the twice?”

Hawkeye rubs the back of his neck. “Well, you’d know, wouldn’t you?”

“ _Hawk,_ ” Peg says, and Hawkeye grimaces. Unlike BJ, she only ever calls him Hawk when she’s upset with him. And God forbid she ever call him by his full, entire, given name. Nobody could ever draw out the syllables of “Benjamin” with more righteous dignity than Peg Hunnicutt. Even his own mother had never achieved it. 

He sighs. “I may have, on occasion, snuck a few paragraphs into BJ’s letters when he wasn’t looking.”

“So, you wrote to me. Posing as my husband, I might add. Hawkeye, why?”

“I...there were things I wanted to tell you. Words I wanted you to have. But I didn’t want you--or BJ, for that matter--to get the wrong idea about...well, you understand. So, from time to time, I’d put a little addendum in. BJ never proofreads his letters before he sends them, you know. That’s a very bad habit.”

Peg picks up an armful of the letters and pushes them into Hawkeye’s own. “Help me find them. Every word, Hawkeye. I want to read them all and know they’re from you and not the man I married.”

“Does it--Peg, does it really matter?”

“It _does_. You have to know it does.”

“A lot of the gushy stuff is Beej. Most all of it, even. You should know that.”

“I do. But I want to know what of ‘the gushy stuff’ is you, too. And I can’t find it alone. There’s too many of them to sort through, examining every single ‘a’ and ‘u.’”

Hawkeye sighs his defeat and starts to arrange the pile she’s given him in a neater stack. He picks up the top letter and lets his eyes scan over the text. Finding nothing, he goes to the next envelope and the next. Peg continues her own search. After a few long minutes, Hawkeye breaks the silence with a loud “Ah-Ha! Eureka.”

“Let me see!” Peg says, grabbing for the letter. He surrenders it easily for fear it will otherwise tear. Peg’s eyes seek out those tell-tale vowels. There. And, because she is sometimes merciless, she reads it aloud:

_Peg, you’d never know there was a war going on from the state of this camp. Everyone’s (almost everyone--Frank Burns is always the exception to normal human feeling) in fine spirits and glad tidings abound. Why, you ask?_

_Because of a goat. Yes, you heard that right. Radar found the thing wandering the borders of camp, drawing a gnawed off length of rope behind her. Now, everyone is over the moon, expecting fresh goat milk and all the assorted dairy-related luxuries. It’s been a long time since camp had access to anything but powdered. I_ (Hawkeye, speaking for BJ, Peg’s mind reminds) _am especially excited at the prospect of goat-milk ice cream. The mess hall can’t be trusted with it, but Nurse Nakahara promises she knows how to make ice cream in a bucket, given enough ice. I’ll drink a liquid bowl of it in your honor._

_Speaking of you and your honor, I hope you got out of that argument with your dad all right. I know he’s a good man, but sometimes I just want to shake some sense into people on your behalf. Just remember, Peggy, you’re a strong, intelligent woman who knows what is best for yourself and your daughter. Don’t let him bully you into doing anything you don’t want. Whether you decide to go back to Oklahoma for the season or not, I’ll support you, but I want it to be your choice and not anyone else’s._

_I don’t say it enough, but I’m proud of you. Ever since I got to know you, I’ve been charmed by your resilience, your kindness, and your sense of humor. There are a lot of women in the world, Peg, and while they’re all nice girls, you’re always going to be at the top of my list._

Peg drops her hands a bit. “I never suspected it was anyone but BJ writing to me, at the time. Even though...there, a page later, he mentions the goat again. Only, for him, it was brand new information. Why? Why did you tell me about the goat? Or give me advice about that fight I was having with Dad or...or tell me I was ‘strong’ and ‘kind’?” 

Hawkeye is blushing. It’s a rare sight, and any other time Peg would revel in it, but now she’s too confused, and a little hurt. 

“Was it a joke of some sort?” she asks. “Did you have a reveal planned, someday? ‘Surprise, Peg Hunnicutt! It was me, Hawkeye, all along. Aren’t you gullible!’”

“No! _No_. God, Peg, it--it sounds stupid, if I think about saying it outloud.”

“You often sound stupid. No reason to stop now.”

Hawkeye cringes at the slight barb. “You’re really angry with me, then.”

“Yes! Yes, I am. Because I don’t understand you. It’s all just another big fib! All these lovely things you said, and you weren’t being you. So, what were you _doing_?”

“Pretending!” Hawkeye shouts, voice sharp with irritation, reaching that higher register he often exhibits in the midst of a righteous rant. He throws up his hands in exasperation. “Seeing how the other half lived, maybe. Trying to...trying to share in some of that glow that BJ always got whenever...I told you, it’s _stupid_.”

Peg lets the letter fall to the floor. She darts over other precarious stacks of letters, knocking a few small towers down in the process, and throws her arms around Hawkeye’s torso (not as thin these days as it used to be, thank goodness). “You _are_ stupid,” she sighs against his chest. “A stupid, silly man. You could have just written to me yourself, you ninny. I’d have loved to hear from you, just as I loved to hear from any of BJ’s friends. I would have written you a letter every day, just like I did for BJ, even. Honestly, I would have. You didn’t have to pretend anything.”

“I didn’t want to bother you. You had...a life. You had the real world, right here, in picturesque California. I didn’t think it would be right, me tromping my muddy, bloody combat boots all over your paradise. Surely having one pair of those boots stomping around was enough.”

Peg gives his waist another squeeze. “You were wrong. I wouldn’t have minded. I wish you’d just asked BJ or me. Neither of us would have minded at all.” She pulls away, looking down at the scattered mess of letters. “There’s more, in there?”

“Yeah. Probably a few lines, scattered across a few hundred pages. I didn’t always have time to write, and I couldn’t always get into BJ’s letters while he was away, so sometimes it’s just a thought or two. But they’re there.”

Peg nods. Suddenly, some of the more disjointed portions of her husband’s letters make sense. Seemingly random lines popping up between paragraphs, detailed exposition of the day’s events breaking off into statements of well-wishes, expressions of admiration, tentative reminders of love. She had assumed that BJ was writing his letters in and around his work, and she knew, as Hawkeye had said, that her husband had never been diligent about checking his work before turning it in.

“It was the letters for you, too, wasn’t it?” she asks many hours later, after they’ve gone through every page and found every hidden note. Peg marks them all in a gentle bracketing with a blue-colored pencil, so she’ll never struggle to find Hawkeye’s words again. “BJ read my letters to you, and you felt like I did when I read his--you fell in love with the story being told.”

Hawkeye shrugs, pulling her closer to his chest. She relaxes there with ease. It’s second-nature, these days. “Yeah, all right. I guess so. First the myth, then the woman. I’d have told you about it, after we left Chicago, but I didn’t--I wasn’t sure how you’d feel. I thought you’d be upset.” 

“I’m glad you wrote me, Hawkeye. I wish you’d told me about it yourself instead of letting me find out on my own. Even if I had been angry, we would have worked it out, remember? We _talk_ about things in this triangle.” She smiles. 

“Don’t worry,” Hawkeye assures her. “That’s the last secret between the three of us. There aren’t any more. Unless you’re keeping something from BJ and me, now.” It’s a joke, but it rings a little too close to the truth, and Peg winces at the prickle of guilt his words inspire.

She sighs, sitting up. Hawkeye’s amused expression immediately falls. “Oh, no. What is it?”

“I was going to wait for BJ to come home, but I suppose I can say it twice.”

Hawkeye looks at her with such apprehension that she gives in just to end his suffering.

She smiles, widely, pulling another opened envelope from the thickly folded belt at the waist of her skirt. “I got accepted!” She declares, handing him the letter. He grins at her, opening it up with far less care than he’d shown to her other envelopes, and quickly reads the first few lines.

“Atta girl!” he hoots, “I knew you would make it! I can picture it now, the second Doctor Hunnicutt. Dr. Peg Hunnicutt, professor of literature. Emeritis, whatever that means. It has a great ring to it.”

Peg beams. “Slow your horses, mister. I have to get this master's degree, first. But thank you. I couldn’t have done it without your help. Those application letters were a bear, and it never would have occurred to me to use Colonel Potter as a personal reference.”

Hawkeye shrugs. “If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s game a system. Congratulations, gorgeous. We need to find a sitter for Erin. I’m going to take you out to celebrate.”

Peg shakes her head slightly. “I’m all for a celebration, but I don’t want to leave Erin out of it. She helped, too, you know. I never would have decided to go back to school if she hadn’t proved herself ready to handle my being away.”

“Peg, I keep telling you, you’ll hardly miss a thing. Beej and I can--.”

“I know, I know! You two have it all in hand. Just let a mother worry a little, will you?” She grins, remembering her achievement all over again. It warms her right down to her toes. “I’m so excited to be learning, again. I can’t believe it.” 

Hawkeye starts to pull the other letters together, building neat stacks once more and preparing to tie them up for storage again. As he reaches into the old shoebox, however, he goes still. “What’s this?” he asks, pulling the small, shiny object out. 

“Oh, that’s BJ’s bronze star. I found it in his sock drawer ages ago. I meant to fix it, but it slipped my mind.”

Hawkeye holds up the medal and its detached ribbon, cradling them in each palm as if they might explode at any second. “Strange. He told me he’d given this away.”

Peg nods, “To one of the boys in post-op. Yes, he did. I guess the military found him out and gave him another one, at some point. By that time, BJ was sick of fighting it, I suppose. So, here it is.”

Hawkeye smiles wryly. “You make a habit of that, don’t you? Finding things for BJ that he’s lost.”

Peg smiles at him. “Only the really important things. Don’t tell him I’m keeping it safe, though, please. I don’t think he’s ready to accept that it exists and is his, yet.”

“Does this count as going against the Honesty Triangle?” Hawkeye asks, very seriously, frowning down at the medal with personal affront.

Peg sighs. “I don’t know. And I’m not sure I care. I just don’t want to see the War Mask again.”

Hawkeye’s brows draw together as he slowly, gently lowers the shoebox and all its contents back to the safety of the bed. “Sorry, the what?”

Peg blushes. “It’s...it’s the face you all get, when you’re reminded of something bad from the war. For most of the veterans I’ve met, it’s-it’s a slab of stone that comes down. It makes me feel like, like an intruder, or one of the enemy, even. Kept out by a wall.”

Hawkeye stares at her. “Oh, Peg,” he says, gently. He pulls her towards him and kisses her temple in the way she especially likes. “You’re the sweetest soul I’ve ever met. And I know Radar O’Reilly, so that’s really saying something.”

He pauses a moment, then asks, tentatively, as if he is afraid to know: “You said ‘most.’ Do some of these ‘War Masks’ look different?”

Peg nods.

“How?”

Peg reaches up and traces a few short, staggered lines across his face, like a strike of lightning, jagged and wild. “Yours is broken,” she says, matter-of-factly. “Your pain shines through the gaps. In some ways, I think it’s actually worse to see.”

Hawkeye closes his eyes. He rests his chin on her head, breathing in that careful, modulated way that both she and BJ have learned means ‘be quiet, please.’ After a while, his breathing returns to its normal, unmoderated rhythm and he opens his eyes. “Have you ever talked to BJ about these mask things?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“For the same reason he doesn’t need to know I’ve saved his star. For the same reason we don’t talk about the way I catch him, sometimes, performing surgery in his sleep. For the same reason we go out of town every 4th of July without discussing it, trying to outrun every fireworks show in the county. Sometimes, we’re both just sick to death of thinking about the war.”

Hawkeye’s smile is wry. “Ah. I couldn’t agree more.”

“Help me pick up the rest of this,” Peg says. “I should get dinner started if we’re all planning to eat as soon as BJ gets back.”

\--

Peg’s days are a whirlwind. In the mornings, she is the first to drag herself from their dogpile of a bed, always awake and dressed long before the sun so much as thinks of rising. She starts breakfast first and then wakes Erin--a process that always takes significantly longer than Peg would wish--so that she can be bathed and dressed and fed by the time BJ comes down to eat. The three of them share a frantic meal that usually ends in BJ standing, one last piece of toast gripped between his teeth, and heading for the door while Erin tags along behind him, pleading with him to stay just a little while more.

Wrangling Erin back from the driveway always takes ten precious minutes, at least. Peg plans for this interlude, scheduling the extra minutes in, forcing herself to wake up earlier to compensate. Even with such precautions, however, she finds herself constantly padding out to her father’s waiting car in her house slippers, her apron stained and her hair a tangled mess. It’s not so bad when it’s Floyd at the wheel, but sometimes he brings Peg’s mother with him, and her closer scrutiny leaves Peg feeling brittle and tender all the rest of the day. 

Once Erin is settled comfortably with her grandparents for the next few hours, Peg can turn her attention to Hawkeye, who rouses himself just before noon, most days, and always wakes up hungry. She cleans up the breakfast dishes and then puts them to work again, setting out lunch. Hawkeye eats and chats with her for a while and then slinks off elsewhere in the house, usually to read or nap or haunt the shadowed corners like a ghost. 

Peg keeps close to home, if he seems likely to remain awake, and works on tidying up the house--which never seems really clean at all--or, if the weather is fair, tending to the flower beds along the sides of the walls (they didn’t used to have flowers, owing to the reluctant nature of Peg’s green thumb, but one day Mrs. Wilson next door made a dry comment about the nakedness of their lawn, and now there are heaps and heaps of flowers striving for life everywhere one looks). 

If Hawkeye seems liable to nap away the afternoon, Peg legs it or takes the bus and does the shopping in brief, harried attacks. She swoops in on the greengrocers and takes off with all the discounted vegetables. She cuts her way across the line at the butchers and plucks the least disagreeable pieces of the cast off meats out of the freezers. She stops by the pharmacy and picks up BJ’s sleeping pills and Hawkeye’s odd assortment of requests (painkillers and vitamins and more) and, on a whim, sometimes, a new tube of lipstick from the display at the counter. She picks up their dry cleaning and drops more off again. She takes the mail to the post office--most of it BJ’s correspondence, mostly to fellow medical experts with names she doesn’t know--and gives the man across the counter a fixed smile when he, as always, compliments her dress with just a bit too much interest. 

By the time the house work or the errands are done, it’s time for Erin to return home again. Peg sometimes picks her up on foot and then takes her home via the bus. Most days, though, she meets her father’s car in the driveway and breathes a sigh of relief to have her daughter, chattering and happy, burst out of the doors and into her arms. Peg fixes Erin an afternoon snack and spends a half hour or so playing pretend games with her before shoo-ing her off to the dining table to play with blocks or her paper dolls while Peg washes the lunchtime dishes and then puts them out again for supper not long after.

BJ is often late for supper, or he doesn’t come home at all--more and more, he stays overnight in the city to better start his early morning shifts on time--and either way dinner is a quiet affair as Peg half-dozes over her dinner and Hawkeye--often freshly woken from a nap or freshly medicated with one of BJ’s sleeping pills--does the same. Erin, undaunted, is the only voice at the table as she shares her morning adventures with Pop-pop and Grandma. Peg does her best to keep up with the conversation, almost relieved when all that is expected of her is to nod her head and make agreeable sounds from time to time. 

After dinner, Peg scrubs Erin up for the second time and dresses her for sleep. She reads Erin a bedtime story--sometimes two, when required--and tucks her in. Hawkeye sometimes lingers in the hall outside her doorway during these calm moments, unwilling or unable to break the moment with his full presence. 

Hawkeye goes to bed not long after Erin. Peg stays up for many hours more--sometimes to welcome BJ when he finally returns home, sometimes to wait until the end of his evening shift to call the hospital and tell him goodnight. While she waits out the clock, she writes letters to Madeline and Father Mulcahy. After BJ goes to sleep, she goes over her lists and checks off each completed task with a feeling of deep satisfaction. 

When she goes to sleep around midnight, every mental check box is filled. When she wakes up in the morning, they’re all empty, and it starts all over again.

\--

The party is just as boisterous and full of joy as Peg promised. 

Six months after bringing the lost, lamented Benjamin Hawkeye Pierce back from his own personal war, the Hunnicutts and the man himself had come to the unanimous decision to spread the news.

Hawkeye still laughs, even now, when he thinks of the opening lines of the invitations. “Announcing the Return of One (1) Prodigal Son! Details Below.”

Now, a full year after his homecoming, the celebration roars. Peg thanks her lucky stars that she’d had the foresight to rent a separate venue and book a few hotel rooms. In her wildest dreams, she’d never expected a one-hundred percent return on the RSVPs. There are dozens of people in attendance whose names even Hawkeye and BJ barely seem to know.

“Good excuse for a 4077th reunion,” Hawkeye says, with some of his new, hard-won humility. Peg rolls her eyes at him. 

“Also they love you.”

Hawkeye grins at her. “Sure. Also that.” 

“Oh, uh, here’s your drink, sir,” Radar O’Reilly says. He’s going by Walter, now, but no one in the room seems able to remember that. Peggy does, out of kindness, and every time she calls him Walter, he smiles so wide his little face looks sure to break.

“Radar, I’ve told you, stop calling me ‘sir.’ It was passe enough when I was in the Army. Now it’s just gouache.”

Radar, clearly not understanding, just smiles. “Uh, yes, sir. Uhm, Hawkeye.” The younger man grins, hugging Hawkeye for the fourth time that night. “It’s just real good to see you, s--Hawkeye. Honest.”

“Thanks, Radar. It’s good to see you, too,” Hawkeye says, and Peg knows he means it by the hint of dampness in his eye.

“Hey, look,” BJ says, pointing across the way. “Looks like their plane finally got in.”

“Klinger!” Hawkeye yells, too loud. He lifts up both arms in a greeting, sloshing the liquid out of his cup. He’s only drinking straight soda, but no one needs to know that. “You’re still wearing pants!”

“Pierce!” Klinger yells back, “You’re not dead, after all!”

The two men meet in the middle and shake hands. Soon-Lee offers her hand to Hawkeye, too, and smiles when he kisses it. “Klinger, your wife continues to outshine you in every way. Honey, when are you going to leave this big-nosed lout and run away with me?” 

Soon-Lee giggles. “Oh, never,” she says, warmly. “I love him, you see.”

“Oh, well. I guess sometimes we just can’t help our rotten luck. And who is this beautiful young lady?” Hawkeye crouches down to eye level of the toddler sitting in Soon-Lee’s arms. He pulls a comic double take. “Klinger, this poor kid has your nose.”

“Yeah, but she’s got her mom’s eyes, so I figure she’s gonna be all right. Let’s just hope she gets _my_ legs, though, that’s all I’m saying. Soon-Lee couldn’t wear a good Stiletto heel if her life depended on it.”

Hawkeye’s laughter fills the room. Several heads turn toward the sound, faces all smiles in response to the infectious bray.

“Hey, Hawkeye. Can I have this dance?”

Hawkeye whirls at the familiar voice, eyes lighting up with the unrestrained force of his smile. “Kellye!” he crows. He hugs the woman for almost a full minute, leaving her blushing. 

“You’re looking real good, Hawkeye,” she says, giggling a little, patting at her mussed hair.

“And you, my dear Ms. Yamato, are as beautiful and shining a star as ever. You have to share this dance with me-- _do_ you want to dance with me?”

“Sure,” Kellye says, though she shoots a concerned a look over his shoulder as she does. Confused, Hawkeye follows her gaze to where Peggy stands, arms crossed and expression hard to read.

“Oh, don’t worry about her. That’s just my warden. Hi, mom.”

Peg rolls her eyes and pointedly takes the soda glass still clutched in Hawkeye’s fingers away from him. Not subtle at all, she sniffs its contents. 

Hawkeye looks over at Kellye with one of his more manic grins. “Don’t worry,” he assures her, “my drink of choice these days is Coca-Cola. I love to ‘be refreshed’ don’t you?”

Peg hands the glass--truly nothing but the cola it appears to be, thank goodness--to Kellye with an apologetic smile. “Can you excuse us for a second? I promise I’ll bring him back before the next song.”

“Aw, c’mon, Peg. She’s been wanting to dance with me for years. And I’m so good at the Lindy.”

“She can wait,” Peg says as she drags him away, “I don’t know if you noticed, but that young lady is wearing a wedding ring. She has prior engagements. Or one, anyway.”

Hawkeye spins so hard in Peg’s grasp he nearly dislocates his own shoulder. “No kidding?” he crows, clearly overjoyed. “Hey, Yamato, who’s the lucky guy?” he yells across the room.

Looking worried and also rather embarrassed, Kellye nevertheless yells back, “Elijah King! He’s in the Navy! He was part of the 24th Infantry Regiment in the war!”

“Congratulations!” Hawkeye shouts, just before Peg unceremoniously pushes him and herself into a broom closet. 

“Oo, Peg! You know, all you had to do was ask.”

Peg pulls the chain on the bare ceiling bulb. Hawkeye winces in the sudden light. Peg reaches up and grabs him by his ears, pulling him down to her level. She stares at his eyes. His pupils are blown so wide, she could nearly push a quarter clear through them. 

“What did you take?” she hisses, horrified.

“What?”

The door opens. Peg turns, intending to tell the intruder what for, but her hackles return to parade rest at the sight of her confused-looking husband. “Did you dose him with something?” she demands. 

BJ’s expression falls, going from gleeful to grim in record time. He sighs. “No.”

“I didn’t take anything,” Hawkeye argues. “I wish I had thought of that, actually. I-I-I’d trade one of my _kidneys_ for a diazepam, right now.” Peg realizes that he’s shaking. He’s not breathing right. He’s soaked through with sweat, though the rented ballroom is quite temperate. She curses herself. She’d been so quick to assume he was up to no good--falling into old, bad habits from his Chicago days--that she’d overlooked the painfully obvious.

BJ gently buffalos Peg aside and takes over her examination. “You should have told us you were feeling anxious,” he says, gently, pushing Hawkeye to sit down on a big unopened box of cleaning fluid. 

“I didn’t want to spoil the shindig,” Hawkeye pants. He’s trying to fall into the pattern of one of his usual breathing techniques, but it doesn’t seem to be working out. 

BJ presses his fingertips against Hawkeye’s wrist, silently counting out his pulse. “Put the brakes on, Lee Petty. You’re racing without a permit.”

Hawkeye tries to laugh, but the giggle gets lost in his hitching breath.

“BJ,” Peg says, voice sharp with worry. She’s never seen Hawkeye have an attack this bad. 

“I have some valium in my kit. I just need to go out to the car and--.”

They all three flinch when the closet door opens again, flooding the room with light and noise from the large room outside. Sidney Freedman almost looks out of place to those that know him when not wearing his olive green uniform. The black suit and dark green tie don’t look too shabby, though. “Looks like the real party is in here,” he says, voice steady and comforting. His dark eyes settle on Hawkeye with the easy understanding of a true professional. “Need a hand?”

\--

Peg tries not to pace. If she starts to pace back and forth in front of the closed broom closet like some sort of frantic lioness, she’s going to spook their friends. So far, no one seems to have noticed that Hawkeye is MIA. Or, if they have, they’re pretending not to notice the disruption _very_ well. The atmosphere is one of immense revelry and ultimate familiarity; it’s the most sincere and loving family reunion Peg has ever had the honor of attending. 

Too bad the guest of honor is currently gasping like a fish on the other side of the shabby closet door. Peg hugs herself more tightly and gives into the impulse to pace. Just little, tiny mincing steps that cause her low heeled shoes to tap pleasingly on the hardwood floor, providing a soothing drone under her racing thoughts.

BJ, bless him, has gone back into the fray to keep everyone’s attention on the party. Sidney had assured the doctor that he didn’t need to go fetch his medical bag and the valium within. Peg wishes BJ had gone out, anyway. She doesn’t know Dr. Freedman except by his reputation. And for all that his reputation is a good one, it’s not enough in the moment to put her mind at ease. 

“Mrs. Hunnicutt?” 

Peg jumps guiltily, caught out mid pacing. Sidney offers her a warm smile. “Can you come in here, please?”

“Of course,” she says, frankly relieved to be given the choice. Being shoo’ed away from Hawkeye had been painful, to say the least.

She shuts the door firmly behind her and leans against it, not wanting to crowd anyone, Hawkeye especially. Hawkeye looks up at the sound of her entrance. His skin is pallid and damp, his eyes red-rimmed. His pupils look more right, now, but she can’t be entirely sure in the poor light of the single bulb. He offers her a weak, watery smile. “Hey, beautiful,” he greets her, voice a mere croak. “How’s tricks? Anybody set any fires out there, yet?”

Peg shudders at the thought. “Not yet.” She approaches him slowly and kneels down. The knees of her stockings will be ruined, smudged with grime and probably rubbed full of holes. It doesn’t matter. She casts a wary glance toward Dr. Freedman before taking Hawkeye’s hands in her own. 

“So. Too much of a good thing, huh?” she asks, trying to keep her tone light. The guilt is going to drown her, she’s sure of it. Hawkeye had been trying to tell her for months that the party was a bad idea. She should have listened.

“I am the ultimate hedonist, you might remember,” Hawkeye says. “I don’t know the meaning of moderation.” 

“Well, I do. I should have been smarter about this.”

“Hey. It’s not your fault. I was having a great time.”

“Yes, right before the complete mental breakdown, you really seemed to be enjoying yourself,” Peg replies, sarcastically. She rests her forehead on his knee, avoiding the eyes of the men around her and staring at the patch of concrete floor next to Hawkeye’s toes. “What do I need to do? Should we sneak you out the back? BJ can pull the car around, I’m sure.”

Sidney Freedman clears his throat. “Actually, I think it’d be best if Hawkeye goes back to the party.”

“What?” Peg says, sitting up. She can’t keep the flare of anger out of voice, and her fists tighten in a reflexive clench.

“Whoops, now you’ve done it,” Hawkeye says to Sidney, amused. Peg shoots him a dark look and then turns that same glare on the psychiatrist.

“Listen, Dr. Freedman--.”

“Sidney is fine,” he corrects, mildly.

“Sidney. I have the utmost respect for you as a professional--.”

“Oh, thank you,” Sidney drawls, clearly sensing the ‘but’ coming. 

“--But you don’t know Hawkeye like we do. He can’t go back out there.”

Sidney’s placid expression takes on a veneer of amusement. He looks to Hawkeye. “I don’t know you like they do,” he parrots, and his lips _definitely_ twitch. 

Hawkeye’s eyes have a familiar, humorous sparkle. Peg’s being laughed at, and she doesn’t care for it.

“All right,” Peg sighs, sitting back on her heels, anger momentarily banked by the wicked gleam in Hawkeye’s eye. “What am I missing?” 

“Sidney’s gotten plenty of opportunities to get a good mapping of my inner workings, Peggy,” Hawkeye tells her. “Hell, he knows more about the terrain of my psyche than I do, at this point.”

“God help me,” Sidney jokes.

Hawkeye gives her fingers a gentle squeeze. “The actual joke, though, is an inside one. Do you mind, Sidney?”

The shrink shrugs. “I don’t mind if you don’t.”

Hawkeye’s impish expression makes her heart clench in a combination of adoration and dread. He grins at her, all teeth. “Sidney knows me _exactly_ as well as you and Beej, honey. He was a real comfort to me during that awkward year when BJ and I were playing around the banks of that river in Egypt.”

Peg stares at him, looking for a hint of deception. Hawkeye will often lie for the sake of a really good prank, or as a means to a justified end. She doesn’t approve, really, but it’s not unprecedented, even within their Truth Triangle. One look at Sidney’s face, however, dispels her of any notions that he might be pulling her leg.

“Oh,” she squeaks. “Does...does BJ know?”

“No. I wasn’t hiding it from him, mind you,” he rushes to explain. “It just never came up.”

Peg swallows thickly. She’s dizzy. Every single person from that camp is insane, she decides, and all they did was bring the madness with them, _en masse_ , when they came back stateside. “Ok,” she says, mostly to herself, processing. “Ok.”

She looks at Sidney and no longer doubts his good intentions or his competence as far as Hawkeye is concerned. No one can look at Hawkeye like that and mean him harm. “You really think we should all go back out there, Doctor?”

“I do.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not the crowd that’s making Hawkeye nervous,” Sidney explains, patiently, “it’s the expectations they have about the man they’re all here to see.”

Hawkeye rubs his thumb against the web of Peg’s hand. “I’m trying too hard to be the old me. The man with the non-regulation robe and the intravenous moonshine and the harem of nurses and the hundred jokes to tell per minute. ...I’m just _exhausted,_ Peggy.”

Peg kisses his fingers, brushing her lips over the knobby surface of his knuckles, first one hand and then the other. “Okay. Then we’re going to start over.”

Hawkeye frowns. “Say what?”

“I’ll show you. Come on.” She drags Hawkeye up and then pauses on her way out the door. She leans over and pulls Sidney Freedman toward her by his lapels, kissing him firmly on the lips. “You’re a good doctor and a very nice man. Thank you.”

She then pulls Hawkeye out of the closet and makes a beeline to BJ. “Here,” she tells her husband, pushing the other man into his care. “I’ll be right back.”

“Hello, stranger. What’s my terrifying wife up to?” Peg hears BJ say, but she ignores him. Her heels click-clack a staccato beat all the way to the raised stage. She smiles at the members of the small, military band as she ascends. 

“May I interrupt you a second? Oh, thank you. Yes, I’m just going to take this microphone, please--Hello!”

The band goes silent. The microphone squeals with feedback and Peg winces, holding it out farther from her lips. “Oh, dear. I’m terribly sorry,” she says, “Uhm. I’m not much of a public speaker. Can everyone in the back hear me all right?”

From the back, someone gives a loud and drunken whoop.

Peg smiles at them, even though all she can see, suddenly, are blurry faces and too-bright lights. She swallows heavily. “Good! Well. In case you don’t know me, I’m Peggy Hunnicutt--.”

A cheer that sounds suspiciously like BJ, followed by a smattering of applause. Peg is going to faint. 

“--As one of the coordinators of this, uhm, this party, I want to first of all thank you for being here. It means to the world, it really does. To someone like me, who first met most of you in the pages of my husband’s letters, it has been a treat to speak with you face-to-face. You--you’re his family, the sisters and brothers and others whom I know only by how much he loves you.

“Today, we’re here, together, because one member of this family went away for a while. When he was gone, we all missed him terribly. And now he’s back, and we all just couldn’t be happier--.”

The cheer that rises up is much more enthusiastic than before. Peg has to wait for the thrumming roar to die down.

“--But that’s the thing about the prodigal son, isn’t it? He doesn’t come back the same person he was when he left.”

A hush falls. Any scattered conversations that had carried on while Peg spoke before die in the throats of the speakers. Peg resists the urge to bolt. She’s not done, yet. 

“I--I should have asked Father Mulcahy to come up for this part. I’m not...I’m not very good with the biblical stories--don’t tell my parents, please. But I suppose you all understand, anyway. Better than I ever could. You _all_ went away for a while yourselves--three years or more in a war zone while your families waited for your return. And when you came back home, like the prodigal son, you weren’t the same people everyone remembered. How could you be?”

Peg hopes she’s doing the right thing and saying it the right way. “Hawkeye Pierce, too, has returned from a place that none of us really know and most of us can only imagine. He’s still the man we love and cherish. But he’s not the same. And there’s not a person in this room, I think, who doesn’t understand what that’s like.” 

She pauses, unnerved by the pin-drop silence. “Right?”

“Right!” someone shouts. Maybe BJ, again. Whoever it is, it causes a tidal wave effect, voices calling out to her in agreement and support. Peg lets out a breath, relieved. 

“So, today, I want to re-introduce you to your uncle, your brother, your wayward son. He’s a good man with--with five or six jokes to tell an hour, a vocal distaste for neckties, and a deep, abiding affection for napping barefoot by the fire. He’ll eat fresh eggs by the dozen and can’t stand airplanes and he’s just...he’s home, now. Can you please-- _will_ you please welcome him back with me?” Peg awkwardly steps away from the microphone and claps her hands. Immediately, the entire room joins in. 

Peg waves at the band to start up again. In the commotion, she steps briskly off the stage and crosses the room. Several people try to talk to her but she can only offer them a stiff smile as she passes by, fixated on her goal. She slams the broom closet door behind her and drops down onto the crate of cleaner, putting her head between her knees. The strident scents of bitter detergents are oddly calming, all things considered--a bit like smelling salts, and just a pungent.

A knock sounds only a minute later, at most.

“Come in,” Peg says.

BJ shuts the door behind him much more gently than she had, before. “The custodians are going to start locking this place up for future events, I’d wager.”

Peg says nothing. She continues to keep her back bent and her eyes on the floor.

BJ crouches beside her and places his hand on her shoulder. “You did good.”

“Did I?” Peg asks, tightly. She dares to glance up at her husband, her expression one of pure concern. “I just told so many secrets that aren’t mine! To a whole room of people!”

“Trust me, you did a good job. Hawkeye’s thrilled. When I left, half the room was coming up and actually _talking_ to him instead of just watching him to see what bizarre thing he’d do next. You helped. They’re good people, and I don’t think they meant to come on so strong. It’s just. Well. For a while there, everyone had bought the lie.”

Peg looks up at him with suspicion in her eyes. “What lie?”

BJ smiles. “The one we all fall for, from time to time: Hawkeye Pierce is an untouchable, storybook creature far beyond our normal human kin. You reminded them of his humanity. It helps.”

“Dr. Freeman and Hawkeye had sex,” Peg blurts out.

BJ blinks. “...What, just now?” He looks around as if seeking evidence of said tryst.

Peg tweaks his mustache gently. “No, you joker. Years ago. When you and Hawkeye were...oh. In ‘ _de nile.’_ I get the joke now.”

BJ frowns thoughtfully for a moment, his brow furrowed in thought. “Huh.” 

“See? I just told you another secret I shouldn’t have. What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing’s wrong with you. You just don’t have any patience for beating around the bush. You never have. I’m not saying your, ah, _direct_ approach is exactly the pinnacle of virtue, but at least your intentions are good.”

Peg slides down off the box and pulls herself into his lap, looping her arms over his neck. “The road to hell is paved with those, I’ve been told.”

“Don’t worry,” BJ assures her, “On the other side of that door is a whole room of people who’ve already been to hell and back, Hawkeye included. You’re in good hands.”

“‘Best care anywhere,’” Peg agrees.

\--

Hawkeye greets her with a smile as she returns to the party. As BJ had said, he’s part of a small group of folks, now, all members chatting merrily away among themselves. They’ve taken over a large round table toward the back of the room and, from what Peg can see, the rest of the party-goers seem to be giving them a wide berth--respecting their privacy, perhaps. 

“Peg! Come here, I want to introduce you to the old gang and then some. This is Margaret--you _have_ to get together and talk sometime, trust me--Charles, Ho Jun--graduated with honors from my alma mater, can you believe it?--and Trapper, my old bunkie. And you know the rest, of course. Radar, the good Father, the Colonel, Klinger. Everyone, this is Peg. She’s the best caretaker a basket case could have.”

Peg expects awkwardness at that last pronouncement, but most of the folks around the table just roll their eyes with a fond smile. 

“Trapper,” Peg says in greeting, taking an empty seat beside the man as it is pulled up to the table by several helping hands. “You know, my husband was _intensely_ envious of you.”

This statement causes Trapper John--a devilish looking sort of man with a baby face and curly red hair--to cackle with delight. “Well! If that don’t beat all. Really wanted to get back stateside, huh?”

Peg shakes her head. “No. He wanted an extra year of the war, more accurately. BJ heard a lot of stories about the exploits of Hawkeye Pierce and the famous Trapper John, you know. You’re a hard act to follow.”

Trapper opens his mouth for a moment and then closes it with a snap. “...I’m speechless,” he marvels to the table at large. “I’ve never been speechless before.”

Margaret Hoolihan mutters something that sounds suspiciously like ‘you can say that again.’

Trapper hands Peg an amber-colored drink. “Here. I haven’t touched it, yet. I want you to have it.”

“Trapper,” Hawkeye says, eyes twinkling. “She’s a very happily married woman.”

“Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying.”

Peg accepts the drink, proposal though it may be. She sips at it quietly and listens to the conversations occurring around the table. Most occur in groups of two or three, but from time to time something will be picked up by folks on the other side and the chatter opens up to the entire group. 

“Wish I had a deck of cards,” Hawkeye says at Peg’s other elbow. “Although the nostalgia might be too much for all of us to bear. Not to mention I’d probably lose my shirt--and this time we’d be playing for real American dollars and not Army bucks.”

Peg laughs. “Let everyone keep their shirts on, all right? I can only take so much excitement in one evening.” She falls silent, her attention caught by Father Mulcahy across the way. The young priest watches the faces around the table with obvious intensity, frowning to himself from time to time. 

“Excuse me a moment,” she tells Hawkeye, getting up and circling the table. She taps the priest on the shoulder and smiles when he turns to face her. “Hi, Father. I’m going to stretch my legs. Come with me?”

“I’d be delighted,” Father Mulcahy says, perhaps slightly too loudly, even for the din of the table.

Peg puts her arm through his, and though Mulcahy startles slightly at the touch, he doesn’t dissuade her from it. They walk together arm and arm as old friends, which they are, for all that this is the first time they’ve ever shared physical space. Over the years since the war, they’ve written almost as many letters between them as BJ and she had managed while he was away. They walk away from the roar of the party and out into the brisk, quiet twilight. 

They don’t talk very much. For a long time they are companionably silent, walking around the sparse grounds in big circles as the sky grows darker and only the scattered street lamps light their way. 

“Is something on your mind?” Father Mulcahy finally asks. 

“A lot of things, Father,” Peg says, careful to keep her lips in his line of sight. 

“Well, they say sharing is caring, if you want to talk about it.”

Peg laughs. “All right. What do you think about Hawkeye? How does he seem to be doing, to you?”

They stop walking. It’s easier to speak if they can face each other. The light of a street lamp lights up the priest from above, making him look especially holy to Peg’s non-believer eyes. 

“He’s more quiet than I remember. Of course, these days, everyone seems rather quiet, to me.”

Peg smiles at the weak joke. “But does he--is he happy, do you think?”

“That seems like a question for Hawkeye.”

“I know. But I think if I asked, he wouldn’t tell me the truth--or, at least, not all of the truth. Sometimes I think he doesn’t actually know if he’s happy or not, himself. You haven’t--you’re just not as close to this as BJ and me. Does he seem happy, to you?”

“My dear,” he says, very gently, “What exactly do you plan to do about it if he’s not?”

\--

“Can I have a word with you?”

Peggy jumps, startled back to the present. “I’m sorry. I was a thousand miles away. What can I do for you, Dr. Freedman?”

“Actually, Mrs. Hunnicutt, the question I’m more interested is what can _I_ do for _you_?”

Peg feels her polite smile freeze on her face, suspicion making her spine stiff. “I don’t follow.”

She’s been watching--or, at least, staring in the direction of--the makeshift poker table for the better part of an hour. When she’d returned from her walk with Mulcahy, she’d found that BJ had taken her vacated seat and someone, apparently, had brought out the desired deck of cards. No one is playing for cash, but the table is covered in peanut shells and tiny mints masquerading as chips. She can’t tell who’s winning, but someone seems to be eating the mints on the sly.

“I don’t think you’re aware of this, which is why I’m taking it upon myself to tell you: Peg, you’re not solely responsible for the well-being of anyone in this room. Responsible, maybe, especially for people like your little girl and, well, others whom you love. _Solely_ , however, you are not.”

Peg sighs. “You should meet my friend Madeline, doctor. You’d have a lot to talk about.”

“She sounds like a smart woman,” Sidney says, unruffled. “What I’m trying to tell you is this: With someone in Hawkeye’s position, ups and downs are expected. Up _or_ down, either way, it’s not your responsibility. You’re doing your best, and so is he.”

“He’s not happy, though, is he?” Peg says. She’s glad someone will tell her so, even if the truth of it distresses her right to her core. She finds herself sorting mentally through her to-do lists and self-memos, seeking discrepancies, places in the schedule in which she could provide Hawkeye more of her time. Surely something can be done to fix it, if she’d only try harder. 

“Right now? He’s tickled pink. I may have never seen him happier, in fact. Tomorrow? The next ten minutes? Next week, next year? Who knows?”

Sidney offers her a glass. It’s plain ice water, and she’s grateful for it. She takes a large gulp while he speaks and then holds it in the tight grip of both hands, fingernails scraping in a haphazard rhythm against the cool, damp surface of the glass. “Peg, are you happy all the time?”

She thinks of Erin’s skinned knees and her tears of childhood woe. Of hundreds of lunches eaten alone at the table while her daughter napped. Of dancing with the empty air on the night of her wedding anniversary. Of waking up from nightmares, the bedroom as silent and cold as a tomb without her husband at her side. “No.”

“No one is,” Sidney says, definitively. “Do yourself and Hawkeye both a favor. Don’t expect more from him than he can reasonably give. You saw the kind of damage that does just tonight, didn’t you?”

Peg feels like all the air has left the room. “I...I didn’t mean--.”

“I know. Don’t feel badly about it. You’re not the first or only loved one of a patient I’ve known who’s--well, ‘overcorrected,’ let’s call it. Just let him be. And don’t forget to ‘just be,’ yourself. Life is short.” He smiles at her, offering her a wink. “Stop making quite so many lists.”

Peg smiles ruefully. At least that small concession to the invasion of her privacy answers a question she’s been chewing on for the past few hours. “You’ve been in touch with Hawkeye for a while, haven’t you? Talking with him about his life?” The ‘his life with BJ and me’ goes unspoken, but it doesn’t need said. She just wonders how Hawkeye has been sending and receiving said letters without her noticing it--she’s the only one that goes to the post office, as far as she knows. 

Sidney, to her surprise, expresses something beside his usual, baseline calm. He looks almost...sheepish. “Between you and me? Yeah. Hawkeye and I have been trading letters a very long while. Since he first left Korea, in fact.”

Peg feels her mouth open slightly in surprise. She shakes herself out of the shock. “Did you know where--?” “He never mentioned Chicago by name, no. Though, I’ll admit, I had an inkling. He’s a good liar, our Hawkeye, but he can’t help but get honest in his letters. Something about the written word opens him right up for all the world to see.”

Peg knows this all too well. It’s not just the man’s squashed vowels that gave his words away. 

“Why didn’t you ever tell anyone? All those _months_ , wasted. That kind of information, it--it would have helped so much. Maybe BJ could have--.”

“Hawkeye wasn’t ready,” Sidney says, softly. “Believe me, I’ll understand if you’re angry with me. There were days, reading some of the things he wrote to me, the reports of what he was going through, that I was angry with me, too. But he just...he wasn’t ready, and I couldn’t--wouldn’t-- _force_ him to come home. I couldn’t do that, neither as a professional nor a friend.”

Peg’s fists clench. She makes no attempt to loosen her fingers, to calm down. Still, her voice remains steady, for once, and she takes a small measure of pride in that. “He went with me when I asked. He was ready enough for me.”

Sidney’s smile is wry, taking her petty anger in stride. “Yes. I know. And what a burden that must be for you, now. But, despite all evidence to the contrary, Mrs. Hunnicutt--you are not Hawkeye Pierce’s keeper.”

\--

After the party, after Erin has been picked up from her grandparents’ and tucked in for the night, after Peg has put both her boys to bed, she pulls the telephone out as far as the wire will roll and perches out on the back porch in the pitch blackness of the night. 

“‘Lo?” Madeline’s voice is slurred and hazy with sleep. It’s after two in the morning, there. Peg knows for certain because the operator had warned her of as much. 

Peg presses her hand to her mouth to muffle the sudden sob that rises up in her throat. She can hear her own wet, teary breaths echo back to her over the line, which isn’t very clear to begin with. 

“Peg?” Madeline says, immediately, even without her having said a word, which makes Peg’s heart ache with love for the other woman. “Hey! Are you all right? What happened? Peggy?” 

Peg sniffles softly. “Nothing,” she whispers, voice shattered. “Everything. I don’t know. Maddie, I don’t think I know how to be--how to _be_ , anymore.”

“Aw, geez, kid,” Madeline replies, equally quiet. There is a silence on the line in which all that is heard between them are Peg’s barely muffled tears. Madeline listens and lets her grieve something that Peg doesn’t recognize or remember losing.

“Pack a bag, hon,” Madeline says, finally, when Peg’s tears have run out. “I’m sending you a train ticket in the mail.”

\--

Chicago hasn’t changed much in a year. Peg is comforted by that obvious fact. The first thing she does upon her arrival is take a taxi to the library. She walks through familiar stacks, stares in awe at the familiar domes, and settles in with a stack of books in a familiar chair at a familiar table in the familiar reading room in which the flow of her once simple, organized life had shifted, sweeping her along with the current of Hawkeye Pierce without so much as a by-your-leave. 

There are no brewing fights to break up, today. She’s glad.

\--

Madeline welcomes her with open arms and a bottle of dark brown liquor that reminds Peg mightily of their first night out. “Cures all that ails you and some extra besides,” she promises, pouring a very generous glass. 

Peg doesn’t remember much of that night the follow morning, but she wakes up tear-stained and fuzzy-tongued and feeling lighter than she has in months, if only for a little while. 

\--

Three days into her vacation she wakes up and her first thought is a sudden realization, like being hit by a bolt of lightning. For the first time in years, she hasn’t thought, even once, of the war and all its terrible consequences.

The thought is sobering, and she starts to understand why these stolen moments in Chicago--away from everything and everyone she has ever claimed to love--feel like a miracle. She doesn’t miss her home and the people that make it at all. In the end, she enjoys the feeling of true freedom too much to feel guilty about that. 

A week in, Hawkeye calls Maddie’s apartment line direct. Peg is surprised it took them so long to put the pieces together, that calling Madeline wasn’t their very first thought. They haven’t, she decides, really been paying much attention to her, lately. That’s fair enough, she thinks. Peg hasn’t been paying much attention to herself, either.

“Do you want me to lie to them?” Maddie mouths, her hand pressed hard over the receiver. 

Peg closes her eyes and breathes in and out exactly how Hawkeye has taught her. Slowly, she nods. 

“Sorry,” Maddie says aloud, her chipper tone impressive in how real it sounds, so smooth and unforced. (Later, Madeline will explain to Peg that it’s not the first time she’s lied to a man over the phone to keep him away from a woman in trouble. Peg wants to object that it’s not like _that_ , but she can’t find the right words.) “She’s not here. I hope you find her soon. Keep me posted, all right?”

\--

Peg goes out dancing with Maddie. They go to a small, smoke-filled bar where a stranger with dark lipstick and bleach-blonde hair takes her hand and teaches her how to do the Lindy. The blonde later asks Madeline to stay over and keep their good times going, but Maddie’s eyes flicker over to Peg’s pale face, and she demures. Peg should feel guilty for getting in her friend’s way, but she’s just glad not to sleep alone in an empty apartment that night. Peg reads a mountain of books borrowed from the library under Maddie’s name. She dines out for every meal--with Maddie in the evenings, alone during lunch and her late-morning breakfasts--and never washes a single plate or so much as touches a pan of her own. She goes to a painting class and a writing class and a pottery class and resolutely doesn’t think about how she could be nearly through the first half of that master’s program, by now, on her way to some dream career--would be, in fact, if she hadn’t decided at the last minute to rescind her application. 

_Afraid of failure_ , Peg thinks as she glumly tries to glue together the broken shards of her newest exploded vase; she never can quite work all the air out of the clay. _Or maybe afraid of success_. Hawkeye and BJ had been confused by her sudden withdrawal from the program, but they hadn’t seemed overly concerned, either. Well, why should they ever worry, really? Peg’s always fine.

\--

Peg dreams of a war she’s never seen and two of the three people she loves most in the midst of it, dying by degrees. She tries to reach them, but the air is like moving in syrup. Behind her, Erin cries out, desperate for her to return. Peg tries to change her course, alter her direction and save her child, instead, but her feet keep going toward the bloodied, dog-tagged men sprawled on the ground before her. She wouldn’t be able to recognize the bodies at all if not for the way they curl protectively around each other--a sight she’s witnessed dozens of mornings in her very own bed. She wakes up from the dream with a hoarse yell, and Madeline doesn’t come near her. The other woman just hovers outside the invisible border that makes up the walls of Peg’s borrowed bedroom and stares at Peg with a pinched, ashen face and asks, slowly, as if Peg is a dangerous predator: “Don’t you want to go home?”

\--

BJ calls. It’s his fifth call of the day. Madeline answers the same as she always does, the same lies on her lips. They sound different than they did at first. Before, it was a game. Keep away the Peggy, hide her like an Easter egg from the nosy men. Now, Madeline’s words are terse, her grip on the phone a shade too tight, bleaching her dark knuckles with the washed out color of tension and dread. She keeps flicking glances over at Peg, her dark eyes silently begging Peggy to _please_ just talk to them.

\-- 

Peg stops going to the pottery lessons first. The clay seems to be mocking her more than anything, and she’s tired of feeling frustrated and adrift while the other students around her build wonders from mud. 

She attends a few more painting classes afterward but then drops those, too, claiming that the stench of the acrylics makes her head ache too much to continue.

The writing workshops she makes no excuses for. She simply neglects to rouse herself out of bed, one day, and fails to attend any more of the sessions thereafter.

Madeline takes these changes in stride and with no comment, hesitating only the first night when Peg shakes her head and says, idly, “I’m not hungry” to Maddie’s daily invitation to supper out on the town. 

“Let’s go to the grocers,” Madeline suggests, “I can make you something. We can eat in. That dining table’s not just for storing all my junk on, I promise.”

But Peg waves her away and retires to bed, instead. That night, Maddie goes out to dinner alone and doesn’t come back to the apartment until very late the next day, her slept-in clothes creased and her lipstick an unfamiliar color, if expertly re-applied. 

Peg says nothing about it, and over the weeks that follow, she spends more nights alone than not.

\--

Madeline catches Peg staring out the windows in the mornings, watching a blank brick wall. She makes a joke about it, the same sort of stupid, juvenile pun that Peg has heard a hundred times before from very different voices. The familiarity of the humor leaves her reeling. She doesn’t resist when Maddie comes to her, wraps her arms around her, and whispers confused, soothing nonsense words while pressing lipstick-sticky lips to Peg’s suddenly damp cheeks, leaving marks like bruises behind.

\--

Peg smashes her sole surviving piece of pottery and doesn’t even flinch at the shattering sound. She doesn’t mean to do it; the destruction is not premeditated. One minute, she’d been looking at the chunky, muddy-brown bowl and the next the splintered bits of it had been skidding across the worn wood planks of the apartment floor. 

Madeline returns from work that evening to find Peg half submerged in the embroidered skirt of the second-hand sofa, already bloodied fingers reaching in vain for an especially finicky piece of broken ceramic that wedged itself under the sofa’s legs. Maddie’s medical skills are too clumsy and rough to remind Peg of much of anyone she knows, for which she is glad. All the band-aids she applies fall off within a day of their own accord. Peg takes to rubbing her other fingers against the healing nicks as she sits for hours at a time at the window and considers the blank wall outside of it as if the rust-colored bricks hold the answers to questions she doesn’t even know how to ask.

\--

She’s not overly surprised when Hawkeye and BJ appear at Madeline’s door. In fact, upon seeing their hangdog faces, she feels a sense of immense relief, the release of weeks of expectation. She has recently begun to feel hunted. Now, the hunt is over. She has been caught. 

“Peg,” Hawkeye breathes, like seeing her causes him physical pain. “Peg,” BJ repeats in a similarly choked voice, reaching out. 

She’s been gone a month, going on two. The way they pull her in, bury themselves in her, a suffocating embrace, it’s like she’s been away for years.

\--

They talk at her. She listens. She doesn’t pay attention to the words, as such, but she doesn’t need to. Their faces, their voices say it all. Come back, Peg. We need you, Peg. We love you, Peg. Why did you leave us, Peg? 

She watches them talk and thinks about shadows and how strange it is that one shadow can create another just by soaking up all the light.

\--

Sidney’s face is strange in the context of Chicago. He arrives in a brown suit--good for traveling--and an old hat that leaves his curly hair comically misshapen when he takes it off. Peg tilts her head just so and admires the swoops and swirls of his locks. It’s better than looking at the man’s dark, knowing eyes. She’s had enough of knowing glances, as of late.

“Where’s Madeline?” Peg asks. It’s the first time she’s spoken to anyone since BJ and Hawkeye’s arrival three days before. The question is too important to let lie, however. It’s Madeline’s apartment, after all. It’s unfair that she’s had to leave it. The feeling of guilt Peg experiences seems distant, but it’s still there. 

“She’s visiting family down state. She thought it’d be good to get away for awhile.”

Peg sighs. “I’ve lost another friend, haven’t I? I can never keep them. Even as a child, I never could.”

If Sidney is delighted that she’s broken her silence, his face doesn’t show it. He doesn’t even scramble to start taking notes. Peg figures that as far as patients go, she’s probably small potatoes for Sidney Freedman. He probably already knows exactly what’s wrong with her. She’s glad, if so. Someone should know. She certainly doesn’t. “Why do you think that is?” At Peg’s blank stare, he repeats her words back to her. “That you can’t keep friends.”

Peg shrugs a shoulder and turns to the window again. Maddie lives in an apartment that used to be a factory. The walls of all the buildings on this block are bare brick, inside and out. The windows have metal bars over them, probably made of iron. Outside, Chicago is sticky and ominous with the promise of rain. She wonders if Sidney will go out with her, later, if she asks politely. If they can walk in the rain as it falls. “I smother them, I suppose. That’s what mother always says. She said that was why BJ and I were so bad off when he first got back from Korea. That the only thing that had kept our marriage going at all was the draft. He couldn’t feel overloved when he was so far away.”

Sidney does jot down a note at that. Peg watches his pen swirl over the page. She can’t read the note, though. His handwriting is worse than Hawkeye’s, or he’s writing in some sort of cipher. Peg pretends it is the latter. Sidney would have made a marvelously clever sort of spy. “And what do _you_ think?”

Peg remembers sending a letter--sometimes two--to her husband every day for years. Of immediately befriending a woman outside a diner in a foreign city. Of holding that same woman to her body, too close, as slow Jazz simmered in the air of a hole-in-the-wall club full of women also dancing cheek-to-cheek. Of pulling a man--practically a stranger himself--into her marriage bed after just a few days of knowing him. Peg lifts a shoulder in a partial shrug and keeps her eyes on the bricks beyond. “I think she’s right.”

\--

She’s surprised that Hawkeye is there. She’s seen no one but Sidney for days and days. Then she realizes that Hawkeye is there because he has snuck in without permission. She realizes that, if they knew, Sidney and BJ would be upset about this break in Sidney’s doubtlessly carefully constructed routine. Somehow, that knowledge makes Hawkeye’s presence more tolerable. It is forbidden. He’s breaking the rules under which Peg is now pinned, and that fills her with a sense of strange and wicked glee. She wonders, still sleep-hazy and full of fanciful dreaminess, if this is rather how Wendy Darling felt when Peter alighted at her window sill, chasing his shadow step for step.

“I was crazy once, you know,” Hawkeye tells her, _sotto voice_. He stands very far away, like he knows. Like he knows that he’s a shadow who’s made her a shadow, too, and now he fears that if the blurry edges of their two shadows touch, they’ll _both_ disappear into darkness, never to return. _The shadow can be more important than the substance_ , she thinks. A broken line from a forgotten book, most likely--probably not Barrie. Is it true? Hawkeye seems to thrive, still, even having lost his substance. He’s so good at pretending to be real--always so adept at those careful little lies. Maybe she could pretend, too, if she tried. If she knew the trick. 

Peg’s lips twitch. She’s remembered something else, the memory triggered by his words. An old, inane song that never ends. The kind of catchy line that seems funny until it happens to you. “And was the rubber room filled with rats?” she jokes. _Rats, rats, I hate them! They drive me crazy!_

“Uh. No. It was a bus, actually. With a chicken. At least, that’s what I thought I saw, for a while.” He pauses, hands in his pockets, eyes downcast. He looks uncomfortable. Strangely, she doesn’t think he’s uncomfortable because of her. That’s a change, and a welcome one. “What are _you_ seeing?”

Peg looks at her hands. They remind her of another pair of hands from over a year before. Too thin, too bony. Sporting the marks of violence (she doesn’t remember the violence, now, but she imagines she might have broken one of her badly-formed pots out of spite; the healing cuts are shallow, jagged, messy and raw). “Someone who’s fading away.”

Hawkeye hums softly. “That’s just your chicken,” he tells her, like that means something. “That’s just what you think you see. What’s the reality? What’s the truth?”

Hawkeye leaves her with nothing else but that, but it’s enough to think about, for a while, and it’s more interesting than staring blankly at the bricks through the bars.

\--

Peg watches Sidney as he moves around the room. Sidney doesn’t usually pace. Such uncharacteristic gestures from the usually predictable man confuse her and make her worry. Despite herself, speaking around a metaphorical mouthful of nails, she asks “Is someone hurt?”

Sidney stops mid-step, perhaps even startled. She’s never seen him startled, before. “Why is that the first thing you ask?”

Peg frowns. _Because I care_ , she thinks, but that doesn’t strike her as a useful thing to say so instead she asks, “Because someone’s always hurting, aren’t they?”

Sidney sits down in his usual chair and holds still, after that, no longer oddly twitchy. “What does it matter to you if someone’s hurting?”

She stares at him, faintly horrified by the nature of the question. “Doesn’t it matter to you?”

“Sure,” he says. “I’m only human.”

“I am, too,” she reminds him, though she can understand his confusion. She certainly hasn’t felt very human as of late. Her flesh and blood is a trick she plays, hiding the shifting planes of her true shadow-self. She really thinks she’s getting better at the disguise, though she has no way to prove it. Sidney isn’t the type to be fooled by illusions of substance. He already knows the shadow is there and won’t let her play pretend, when pressed. If Hawkeye ever comes back to see her, she resolves to ask him how it works, being a shadow. She’s very tired of pretending to have skin and bones.

\--

Hawkeye is angry. He’s not angry at _her_ , but he’s unquestionably angry. This frustrated, flailing rage is not new to Peg. Hawkeye is often upset in this manner, railing against the injustices of the world and stymied, again and again, by his own inability to change it for the better. Now, he’s tense and snarling, a cat in a bag. 

_Not a cat, a coyote. Old Man Coyote, stealing fire for the humans and getting singed for his trouble_. _Still a trickster hero, even here, even now. Maybe that’s all shadow people can be. Maybe I could be that, too._

Peg isn’t certain she’s wily enough for such a role. Maybe Hawkeye can teach her that, also. Maybe he can teach her how to steal fire and bear the pain of the burns. 

“They want to take you to an _asylum_ ,” he tells her, biting off the last word like it’s a curse--of the terrible and magical sort, not simply a profanity. He says the word asylum as if the simple word alone will whisk her away to one, never to be seen or heard from again. “And, dammit, BJ’s gonna let them. The rat fink.”

Peg laughs. 

Hawkeye stares at her. “What’s so funny?”

“Rats. That’s what the rubber room is filled with. Remember?”

Hawkeye sits. He’s still keeping very far away from her. “I just wish I knew how to help you,” he mutters. “Sidney knows best. I get that. I’m all for respecting the authority of a medical professional, especially when the medicine in question is all Greek to me. And Sidney’s the one who thinks you need...a place like that. But, God, Peg. I spent some time in one of those--the military edition, but _still_. Locked up like an animal, surrounded by people who are even crazier than you are. It’ll eat you up inside. You don’t need that. Some people do--I did, even, I’ll admit it--but not _you_.”

Peg looks at him with renew interest. This broaches a question for which she desperately wants an answer, a question that has been nagging at the back of her brain since as far back as the night of Hawkeye’s welcome-home party. “What _do_ I need, do you think?”

Hawkeye takes his hands away from his eyes. He leans forward, elbows on knees, staring at her with such intensity that she feels like she’s being peeled open, like Hawkeye has a scalpel in his hand and is digging in deep to see the very core of what makes her tick. “Whatever it is,” he says, finally, “I’d break every bone I’ve got to get it to you.”

She loves him. “That’s very sweet, Hawkeye.”

Hawkeye tilts his head at her, eyes still piercing. Pierced by Pierce. 

“Peg. Have you talked to Sidney about...about the War Masks and things, yet?”

“No. It hasn’t come up. Why?”

“Because. I don’t know. I’m grasping at straws, here. But...maybe I was wrong about your chicken, you know? Maybe for some people, poultry is just poultry.”

\--

“It’s everywhere.”

“Everywhere?”

“Yes.”

Peg twists her fingers in her lap. It’s another Hawkeye tic she’s inherited. He’s her map for what madness looks like, after all. She wonders if Sidney has noticed her mimicry. If it’s in his notes. If it matters at all. If it’s--pardon the joke--all in her head. Regardless, Hawkeye’s tics are soothing, repetitive motions. She understands how they work, now, how the physical motions distract and comfort in turn. She almost wishes she had known about them years ago. Not just before Hawkeye. Not just before the war. Back long ago, when she could never leave the farmhouse without checking all the locks twice. Back when she used to hide away in the campus library, stacking books like walls around her space, warding out the world. Back even earlier, perhaps, when she first became aware of the smothering weight of her mother’s disapproval and immediately dedicated herself to self-improvement via her first ever checklist. 

As Hawkeye had requested, she’s explained the Masks to Sidney. She’s trying, now, to explain how the war is alive. How it clings to the people who left it behind, how even she is infected with it, like a disease that, once you catch it, you can never shake off. Somehow in the midst of this, she mentions the shadows.

“I’m sorry, I missed that. Can you explain it to me again?”

“Hawkeye is a shadow. So am I, now, though I wasn’t, originally. I suppose Hawkeye wasn’t always a shadow, either. I suspect he went to Korea a normal sort of person. More or less. Then he became a folk hero. And then he became a shadow, in those last few weeks of it. And again, when he got back. Because of what the war did to him.”

Peg frowns at herself. “It sounds especially insane, said out loud,” she sighs. “It’s _not_ real. I know that. I don’t think Hawkeye is literally made of a blocking out of light. It’s only a metaphor. All of this is...is allegorical, my mind trying to fit abstract concepts into the rigid structure of words. Oh, and I _hate_ metaphors, too. I always have.”

Sidney’s smile is warm. “Old habits must die hard. I’ll bet you were a very competent literature student.” 

“I was.” It’s true, now that she thinks about it, and Sidney won’t think less of her for her pride.

“BJ says you were even making plans to go back to school not so long ago. But then you changed your mind. Why?”

Peg shrugs. “I was all set to go. I’d been accepted into a good program. It was local, so I wouldn’t have to travel too far from home. I’d decided my degree path. I’d even already enrolled for the first semester’s courses.”

“And then? What happened?”

If Peg twists her fingers any harder, she’ll break a nail. “Erin. Erin woke me up. BJ was out of town--nothing major, just an overnight conference. He’s been doing more and more of those overnight stays because the drive to San Fran and back gets so long with traffic and everything. I don’t mind. But Erin was--Erin was screaming. Calling out for me.”

 

“A nightmare?”

“Yes, because of a nightmare. But not hers.”

Peg looks out the window. She’s still in Maddie’s apartment. No one has carried her away to a padded room. Peg hopes that didn’t cost Hawkeye too dear. She hopes he didn’t get himself in trouble, fighting against Sidney and BJ’s wishes. She wouldn’t have minded the change in scenery at this point, honestly. It’s rained three times since she’s been here, but no one will let her go outside. (She willfully ignores the fact that she’s never actually _asked_ to go out. She doesn’t want to be inconvenient, that’s all.)

Sidney seems impatient. That’s strange, from him. Peg doesn’t blame him for it, however. She can’t quite keep track of time, lately, but she’s certain that he’s dedicated more time here than he really should. He has a life somewhere, doesn’t he? A practice, in New York. Patients whom he can help. “Peg, what _happened_? Who’s nightmare was it that woke Erin up?”

Peg shrugs. It doesn’t matter, not really. It had happened nearly a whole year ago. Erin certainly hadn’t minded it, after the fact--she’d been back to right as rain the next day, not troubled a bit. “Hawkeye’s. We’d only just gotten him settled at home, you see. He was still having nightmares pretty often, back then. I should--I should I have known he wasn’t all right. He pretends so well, you know, it’s hard to see the problems coming, sometimes. I just...heard yelling. And, when I woke up, I realized right away he wasn’t in the bed.”

She looks at Sidney rather guiltily, but he’s not phased. He knows about their arrangement, she’s certain. It’s strange to think that anyone knows their secret. Even Erin doesn’t quite seem to grasp their situation, yet, and she lives with them all--her mommy, her daddy, and their boyfriend. 

“I went down to the living room. That’s where the screaming was coming from. Hawkeye had been asleep on the couch. I guess he’d moved down there for the night. Maybe we had a fight? I don’t remember why he was there and not with me. He was crying. Still asleep, I think. He walked in his sleep, sometimes, those first few months. Maybe that’s why he was downstairs, actually. Maybe he went downstairs in his sleep. Anyway, he was yelling and apologizing. He kept--he just kept calling for Erin, crying out to her that he was sorry. That he...that he didn’t _mean_ to kill her.”

Sidney’s eyes close and stay that way for too long to be anything but a sign of pain. Peg sits up straighter, taking note. It’s rare for Sidney to give much away about his emotions, in a session or otherwise. The man’s legendary poker prowess has much to do with the control he has over his expressions. He knows the answer to this riddle, though. He understands why Hawkeye was shouting, and Peg does not. She’s curious, and she’s smart enough to connect a few lingering dots.

“Sidney,” she says, speaking fast, so that he won’t interrupt the question, though he’s never done such a thing before. “What does Hawkeye mean, when he says I have to find the truth under my chicken?”

Sidney ends the session immediately after that. He seems rather upset, though not at her. That doesn’t put her much at ease.

\--

Hawkeye’s sporadic, secret visits abruptly cease.

Peg misses him more than she’d expected. 

She’s alone again, she realizes. They had _both_ promised not to leave her. But they’re not the ones who broke that promise. She’s the one who left first, as it turns out. She shouldn’t have done that. She hopes they’re all right.

\--

“We should finish our talk about your schooling,” Sidney says. He’s brought her a soda. Some kind of peace offering, maybe, for leaving without explanation. She accepts it. It’s lukewarm, but it’s bubbly and sweet. “Why did you decide not to go back to college, after all? What did Hawkeye’s nightmare have to do with it?”

Peg peels the label away from the glass. 

“It was the reminder, I suppose.”

“A reminder of what?”

“Well, I’d bought into the old lie,” Peg says, with a wry smile. “Just like BJ says.”

“What lie is that?”

“That Hawkeye Pierce is untouchable and doesn’t need help. That he can take care of himself.”

Sidney leans back heavily in his chair. “So you chose not to return to school because Hawkeye needed you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you regret that choice, now?”

Peg pauses, considering. “Hawkeye needed me more than--.”

“More than what?”

Peg shrugs. “More than I needed me.” She frowns down at the half-full (half-empty?) bottle. “Can we stop talking, please? I have a headache.”

\--

“Do you think BJ needs you? Or that Erin needs you? Or your parents?”

Peg watches the sky. If she sits right against the window and tilts her head just so, she can see beyond the brick walls to a tiny corner of it. There’s no clouds at all. Just clear, bright blue sky. No rain for days, now. “Of course.”

“Why do they need you?”

Peg sighs, resting her chin in her hands. She’s getting a kink in her neck. She doesn’t waver, however, from her spot. “Everyone needs someone, don’t they? Erin is my child. I’m her mother. That should be an obvious one, Sidney.” 

Sidney smiles. “Fair enough. And BJ? Your parents?”

“BJ’s my husband. Every husband needs his wife. And my parents are getting older. Older people need their children. You know how it is.”

“Let’s say I don’t. How is it?”

“It’s...well, it’s just how it works. People in families take care of each other.”

“All right. Let me ask you a different question, then. Who do _you_ need?” Peg presses her finger to the glass of the barred window. There’s no condensation, so she can’t see the marks she leaves behind. Slowly, she forms a shape on the smooth surface, dragging her finger in swooping lines. “A psychiatrist, apparently.”

Sidney makes a note. Sometimes she wonders if he has it written in the corner: “Peg: 1, Sidney: 0”

“Who else?”

“I need my daughter,” Peg says. “I love her. I miss her.” She turns to look at Sidney for the first time that session. “Does she miss me? Where does she think I am?”

“You’ve been away from home a long time. Almost three months, one of which you spent with no one the wiser of where you’d gone. It’s an interesting time to start asking these questions.”

Peg raises a brow at him. “You sound accusatory. I’m a bad mom, huh?”

“No, I don’t think that at all. Do you?”

Peg shrugs. “Sometimes. I ran away from home without a word. Just dropped my life and ran away. That wasn’t very good of me to do.”

“That brings me to my next question. If you feel so strongly that these people need you--your parents, your child, the two men you love--why did you leave? What happened?”

She presses her whole palm against the glass, wiping it clean, erasing the pictures she has made. “Do you know the story of the donkey and the palace?”

Sidney just shakes his head. “Can’t say I do.” 

“Well, once upon a time there was a king whose kingdom was plagued by…plague. I’m sorry, my storytelling skills are rusty. I suppose BJ and Hawkeye always do the bedtime stories at home, since I left. I wonder who is reading them now.”

“It’s all right. Go on, please.”

“The plague was the worst the kingdom had ever seen. It spread like fire, destroying everyone it touched. Fearing for his own life and that of his family, the king decided that he must pack up all his worldly possessions and leave his disease-ridden lands behind for greener pastures. There were just a few problems. First, when I say ‘all his worldly possessions,’ I mean it. The king refused to leave so much as a stone of his beloved palace behind. Second, in all the kingdom, the only beast of burden left unmolested by the sickness was one tiny donkey.

“So, the king called forth all of his wisest, most knowledgeable advisors to solve his moving problem. And they came upon a perfect solution. To protect him and his family, the king and his people went ahead on foot and left their kingdom far behind. Back at home, every day for one-hundred thousand days, the king’s most capable stable hand put one piece of of the palace on the donkey’s back. The first day, the flag from the turret. The second day, the stones from the solar. The third day, a few pieces of the dining room furniture. The fourth day, the youngest princess’s small bed. Every day, something new and slightly bigger was added to the pile. Until, finally, after one-hundred thousand days, the whole of the palace was balanced on the donkey’s back. Because the weight had been added so gradually and carefully, you see, the donkey didn’t even notice the burden at all.

“The stable hand, as ordered, pulled the donkey and its massive haul across the desert sands to the new home of his king. They travelled for six-hundred days, the farthest that one could possibly go from the kingdom without falling off the edge of the world. And every day they travelled, the stable hand made sure the donkey kept its eyes downward, focused only on its hooves.

“Then, one evening, the stable hand finally saw purple smoke in the sky, the signal that his kingdom’s people were near. In his excitement, the stable hand pulled up on the donkey’s halter and, for the first time, pulled the rope too high. The doney looked up and, seeing the reality of the weight of its burden, immediately fell beneath it, unable to take the strain.”

Silence stretches between them. “Pretty gruesome bedtime story.”

“It’s a morality tale, I think. I remember reading it for a class my freshman year. I’ve never been able to shake it.”

Sidney makes a note. “I gather that in this allegory, you’re the donkey. So, what made you ‘look up,’ so to speak? Something at the party?”

Peg smiles a tight, humorless smile. “You did. Don’t you remember? You said ‘what a burden that must be for you.’ And that’s when I realized...you were right. It was. It is. The whole kingdom was on top of me, and I couldn’t bear it. So, I had to get away.”

\--

Hawkeye comes back. It’s late, and she’s sleeping. It’s only the sound of his breathing--familiar and, in its own way, comforting--that alerts her to his presence and wakes her up. He’s still too far away to touch, even if she stretches her fingers all the way out. 

“I’m starting to worry you’re an hallucination,” she tells him. 

Hawkeye looks startled in the dim light of her bedside lamp. “Why?”

She gestures at the giant void of space between them. 

Hawkeye closes the distance in a few long steps. He hovers at the foot of her bed. Still out of immediate reach, but closer than he’s been in ages. “I didn’t think you’d...I thought maybe you’d rather I left you alone.”

She laughs at him. “But you keep coming back.”

“I know. Like a bad penny. I can’t seem to stop myself. I have to see you. And, unlike BJ, I don’t have enough respect for authority to stay away. But, I don’t know. I thought maybe that’d be ok, as long as I didn’t touch you.”

She scoots forward down the bed and kicks his hand with her bare toes. Her foot does not, as she’d half expected, pass straight through his fingers. “Sit down, you ninny. What do you want?”

“A time machine,” Hawkeye says so promptly that Peg is convinced he’s been musing over that exact question a lot. He doesn’t sit.

“Why, would you like to see some dinosaurs?”

“Not quite that far. At first, I thought I’d go back to a only few months ago--stop being such a jerk to you and pay more attention to how you were holding up. Prevent all of...this. Then I figured I’d go back a full year and make sure you never so much as saw me in that library at all. Now, though, I think I might as well go for the whole hog. I’d travel back to the very beginning. I’d stop the whole Korean War.”

Peg considers what that would be like. She and BJ, married with multiple children, no three-year gap in their lives together, an empty void. No strange friends of her husband’s popping in and out of their home, haunted and grim and not quite right, somehow. No nightmares, no War Masks, no aching loneliness, no Hawkeye Effect. No Hawkeye in her life at all.

“Where would you be, if the war had never happened?” she asks him.

“Truthfully? Boston, probably. Or some other big hospital, ascending the ranks and making a name for myself as a surgeon. Ideally? Right where I was before it started. Crabapple Cove, sharing the family practice with my dad.”

“Do you think he’d still be alive, too?”

Hawkeye scuffs his shoes against the floor. The new dress shoe leaves ugly black marks on the wood in its wake. Peg sighs. Poor Maddie. “I don’t know. I think about that, sometimes, too. I wonder if it might have kept his heart going just a little longer, if the war had never happened. No extra stress.”

Extra stress. A rather mild way to describe what it truly meant to be one of the ones left behind in a time of war. She doesn’t say that, though. Hawkeye’s suffered for his thoughts enough. “You really are an egomaniac.”

Hawkeye laughs. “Oh, well, I know you are, but what am I?”

Peggy looks around the small room in which she’s lived the last three months of her life. “You’re a shadow,” she says. “And I am, too.”

“And what _does_ The Shadow know?” he jokes, placing his arm and opposite hand over his face like a mask and cowl, the wardrobe of the titular character of the old The Shadow radio show he references. 

Peg reaches over and turns off the bedside lamp, drowning them in inky black. Hawkeye makes a small sound of surprise. Peg then reaches for him, grabs his hands, and pulls him to her and down onto the small bed. “How to hide in the dark.”

\--

Sidney finds them tangled up together in Peg’s borrowed bed the next morning. He wakes them up by dumping Peg’s morning orange juice all over their heads. Peg, shaking sticky droplets off her fingers, licking up juice from where it trickles from her hair and down her chin, laughs. Hawkeye sputters and calls Sidney inventive and highly profane names, which only makes Peg laugh harder. 

Sidney lets BJ and Hawkeye both visit her--without the sneaking--for an hour every day, after that. 

\--

She asks to go outside randomly one morning, interrupting Sidney mid-sentence.

Sidney’s brows lift. “Let’s talk about it again tomorrow,” he says, which Peg is a mother enough to recognize is not a ‘yes’. Still, when Sidney leaves that afternoon, he grips her hand and gives it a squeeze. It’s the first time he’s touched her since their sessions first started, and it feels like some of the wall of professionalism between them has slipped in a manner that, perhaps, promises good things for her future as a real human being.

\--

BJ’s chart is color coded which, God help her, makes her much more interested in it than she might have been otherwise.

“See here? Saturdays, Hawk and Erin and I will go to the pool--or the library, when it gets too cold out for swimming--from nine to noon. Then, we’ll come home for lunch, which we’ll bring with us, don’t worry. Then from one to five, I’ll be on call at the hospital and Hawk and Erin will be at your parents’. Then I’ll be back by six for dinner--which your mom is going to send home with Hawkeye, obviously--and then I’ll get Erin to bed by seven, and then...well, and that’s it, I guess. Now, Sundays--.”

Peg runs her hands over the chart with its colored squares and painstakingly crafted labels. Half of the words on it have squashed ‘a’s’ and aggressive ‘u’s.’ The other half is full of BJ’s sloping cursive hand. “What am _I_ doing on Saturdays?” Peg asks. She thinks this might be BJ’s way of telling her they’re finally locking her away for good, but she’s not sure.

BJ blinks. “Well, that’s just it, Peg. I mean, that’s what this whole calendar system is for. On Saturdays you get to do whatever you want.”

She looks at Friday. At Sunday. At Wednesday. On every day of the week except Saturday, her name is there. Picking Erin up from school (though BJ appears to be dropping her off). Making dinner for everyone (though her name is only there on Tuesdays and Thursdays; Hawkeye has penned himself in on the rest). There are big, open gaps of time in the calendar, too, scattered about all week long. Peg’s name is written there, but nothing else, no directive like “post office” or “laundry.” She taps one. “What’s that?”

“Well, that’s up to you,” BJ says, carefully. He’s been speaking carefully to her since Sidney first waved him into her self-made cell. She hopes he stops, soon. It’s too strange. “But I thought, if you wanted to, you could use that time to go to the library and study.”

“Study?”

“For your degree program. Hawkeye filled out a new application form for you for the fall semester. All you have to do is sign it and mail it in.”

Peg’s eyes dart to the boxes right next to her own big, empty ones. ‘Hawkeye,’ they say followed by the name ‘Dr. Wiles.’ “Who is Dr. Wiles?”

“My new shrink,” Hawkeye says. He’s not said much during this demonstration, just watched her watching the calendar with a hungry, hopeful look. “He’s a good guy. He was stationed not that far from the 4077th, as luck would have it. He, uh. He specializes in battle fatigue.”

BJ nods a bit too vigorously, extremely earnest and desperate to please. “You don’t have to worry about Hawkeye, honey. Or Erin. Or me. We’re all set, see? Right here in black and white. And an assortment of visually appealing rainbow colors, besides.”

Peg bites her lip. She runs a finger down the whole length of Saturday. Whatever she wants, and there’ll be no reason to worry, because everyone has a purpose and everyone has a place, and they can take care of themselves. She finds herself seeking out further instances of Hawkeye’s name, worriedly. There, while she’s scheduled to take Erin to ballet and BJ is scheduled as being at work. ‘Hawkeye,’ it says ‘VAH.’

“What’s ‘VAH’?”

BJ and Hawkeye exchange a look.

“It’s not official, yet,” Hawkeye says, awkwardly. 

“Hawk’s got a job,” BJ says, brightly.

“A _probationary_ position,” Hawkeye corrects, though his grin of excitement is hard to contain. “Turns out the Veteran’s Hospital needs doctors. For routine checkups and minor injuries, things like that. I can’t--I mean, I shouldn’t hold a scalpel again for--for ever again, maybe. But I got my certifications renewed and accepted. I can be a general practitioner again, if I want. And I do. Only three days a week, for now. Maybe full time in a couple of months.”

Peg looks away from him, mimes rubbing her eyes, and looks at him again. “Why, Hawkeye,” she says, with a wonderment that is only half-feigned. “You’re a real boy.”

Hawkeye bends down and kisses her temple in that way that makes her go all warm and gooey. “Look at that,” he says. “So are you.”

\--

They leave Madeline a giant, gorgeous gift basket and a smaller, less gorgeous note. Peg doesn’t expect to hear from her Chicago friend ever again, after everything that’s happened. The least she can do is leave a sign of her gratitude and her love behind in the wreckage she’s caused.

“She’ll call you. Eventually,” Hawkeye assures her, but Hawkeye has been known to tell white lies, from time to time.

Peg watches with some mild interest as Hawkeye dry swallows two pills before boarding the airplane. Peg had wanted to take the train back, but the boys had insisted on getting her home as soon as possible, and the speediest option was to travel by air.

Hawkeye catches her eye and gives the bottle a ramba-esque shake. “Dr. Wiles. Mild tranq. It cures at least half of what ails you.”

“You really are doing better.”

“I’m trying. That’s the deal, isn’t it? I try, you try--.”

“--we all try for ice cream,” BJ interjects, taking Peg’s hand and shoo-ing Hawkeye into his own seat. “You doing all right, so far?” he asks as they sit down.

“I think so. The world is much louder than I remember.”

“That’s just Hawkeye, making all the noise. He gets the verbal runs when he’s nervous.”

“I thought those pills were supposed to help with his flying phobia?”

“It’s not the plane he’s nervous about.”

Peg rests her head on her husband’s shoulder. “You’re in love with two certified loonies. How does that make you feel?”

BJ shrugs. “Well, it’s sure always exciting.” He drops the joke-y attitude and gives her hand a squeeze. “I missed you, darling.”

Peg hums in soft agreement. “You had three years. I had three months. Now, maybe we can put all our wars behind us.”

\--

Erin is wiggly and warm and smells strongly of chocolate chip cookies as Peg holds her in a tight embrace. For a moment she debates never letting go, but Erin starts to fuss, and Peg must surrender her daughter to the world once more.

Hawkeye looks up from where he’s dealing with the luggage. Very faintly, Peg hears him recite under his breath: “Claimed by bone of my bone again / And cheered by flesh of my flesh.”

“I missed you, Mommy!” Erin says, brightly. As she pulls away, she leaves bits of melted chocolate smeared in Peg’s hair. Peg can’t find it in herself to mind. 

“I missed you, too, Bunny.” Peg hugs her again and this time doesn’t let go until someone’s broad hand rests on her shoulder, tugging her gently back.

BJ smiles down at her. “Let’s go inside to finish this reunion, huh?”

Peg doesn’t want to go inside. Her parents are standing there, hovering on their porch, their expressions hard to read. She’s filled up with shame, unable to meet their eyes as she stands and walks toward the house, Erin’s small hand gripped too tightly in her own. 

BJ and Hawkeye walk with her, flanking her like guards. It feels like all three of them are always doing that, creating a blockade between each other and the harshness of the world. 

“Mamma,” Peg greets them, with a stiff nod. “Pa.”

Peg and her parents linger in an awkward standoff for several long seconds. Hawkeye shifts his weight from foot to foot, like he’s readying himself to do something drastic, though what Peg can hardly guess. 

Floyd, her father, surges forward first. He holds her tightly to his wiry frame, murmurs softly into her ear that he loves her and has missed her. Peg swallows hard against the sudden lump in her throat, and relaxes into the hug. Erin, confused by all of the fuss, hugs both her mother and grandfather’s legs, joining in. 

When Floyd releases her, her mother does not fill up the empty place he’s left behind. She offers her daughter a small, jerky nod of recognition and holds a hand out to Erin. “Come along, little one. We should wash you up.” Peg can’t help but feel like this is a deliberate tactic to pull her daughter away from her arms.

“Oh, don’t trouble yourself,” BJ says, swooping in. “I can do that. Let’s go, Bunny. Mm! You’re chocolate covered!” He picks the girl up in a wide, swinging motion and pretends to nibble on her chocolatey fingers. Erin screeches with laughter. It won’t be so long before Erin is too big for BJ to pick her up like that. Three whole months away. She’s grown so much. Peg swallows thickly and pushes the thoughts aside. What’s done is done, now, and for all that Hawkeye wishes so desperately, none of them have a time machine to hand.

Floyd follows BJ and Erin inside. Her mother continues to hover, standing between Peg and the door. She clearly has intentions of speaking in private. Peg relaxes slightly as she feels Hawkeye’s familiar warmth against her elbow. He stands close and, she suspects, looms behind her. Peg and her mother are both small women. It’s not difficult for Hawkeye, tall and gangly as he is, to make an impression, even with his shoulders rounded defensively right up near his ears. Her mother looks up at the man and frowns. She doesn’t put up a fuss, however, and moves without comment out of the way of the door. Peg suspects that she will find herself cornered later in the evening, instead. That’s fine. Any time that is later is better than right now, when she still stinks of Chicago and has the lingering, plummeting sensation of air travel churning her stomach. She needs time to settle back into her old life before meeting her mother’s accusations head on. 

Hawkeye surreptitiously gives Peg’s fingers a squeeze. “You all right?” he asks, voice low. 

Peg shakes her head slightly. “No.”

“We don’t have to go in there,” Hawkeye says, moving to face her, looking down at her with such tenderness that she can physically feel some of her hurt dissolve away under the force of it. 

“Yes, we do. No more running, remember? Not for you and not for me, either.”

“You’re not enough of a coward,” Hawkeye accuses, goodnaturedly. “I can give you lessons, if it would help.” 

Peg thinks of stories told in letters and of old memories whispered about in the dark. Of Hawkeye saving lives while bombs fell directly over his head at Battalion Aid. Of Hawkeye running out in the middle of enemy fire to try and save a North Korean soldier wounded in the grass. Of Hawkeye desperately attempting to save the life of an enemy soldier with a gun to his head. Hawkeye is no coward. And neither is she. 

“Come on,” Peg says, pulling him after her. “We can’t leave BJ in there to fend for himself.”

If anything can convince Hawkeye to follow her willingly into the lion’s den, it’s that.

\--

Later, after a tense family dinner of interminable length and several hours afterward spent barely managing to avoid her mother, all four of the Hunnicutt-Pierce clan return to their home with a big, gusty sigh of relief. After so many months away, Peg is delighted to see their “little piece of heaven” again. It’s such a lovely, perfect house sitting right there on the sea. Peg turns to face the beach and takes a deep, deep breath of salty sea air. The smell is entirely different from Chicago or anywhere else. It’s the scent of home.

Inside, BJ wastes no time in hanging their color-coded schedule up in the kitchen, impossible to miss. Peg watches him with a smile, loving the poster for what it represents more than what it literally is. Metaphorical language, but the best sort. It means love and care and a promise for each of them to do better for each other. No one’s problems are beneath notice, now. No one has to shoulder all the work, anymore. Their three-pronged partnership is truly equal. Or, at least, they’ll try to make it so.

Peg breathes a sigh of relief. When she leans back, she finds Hawkeye standing there. As expected. Hawkeye is always there, cast just behind her. He’s not quite a shadow, anymore, but some of the traits remain. He slides his arms around her torso and rests his chin on her head, watching BJ with an air of definite appreciation. BJ’s arms _do_ flex pleasantly when he’s using a hammer, Peg must admit. 

BJ turns, probably alerted to their intense scrutiny by the warm spot their eyes bore into his back. “What?” he asks.

“Erin, honey,” Peg says, with forced casualness. “I think it’s time for bed, don’t you?”

Erin, from her place at her father’s knee, makes little fuss. She’s been rubbing tiredly at her eyes for half an hour. “Mommy, can Hawkeye read me my story tonight?”

Hawkeye gives Peg a light squeeze. “I’ll be right there,” he tells Peg and BJ both. “Please, by all means, start without me.” He waggles his eyebrows for added effect. Peg laughs.

\--

It’s their first night together in three months. Peg can’t stop mulling over the gap in time, can’t stop second guessing herself with every passing minute. She lost a fair bit of weight in Chicago. Her nightgown hangs from her shoulders. She looks wraith-like and foreboding to her own eyes. What if she’s forgotten how to--?

BJ knocks lightly on the door and doesn’t enter until she calls out to him in the affirmative. It’s another tiny difference in their lives, but infinitely comforting for such a small concession. She has privacy, when she needs it. 

“Everything ok?”

Peg expects she’ll hear that question a fair bit over the next several days. She won’t hold it against anyone. They’re all trying so hard, after all. She smiles wryly at the mirror, catching BJ’s eye in the reflection. “I’m feeling self-conscious,” she admits. Triangle of Truth. 

BJ hums softly. He steps toward her and loops his arms warmly around her waist. He kisses the side of her neck, up to her jaw. She turns toward him reflexively, meets his lips with her own. He presses against her and she steps obligingly back, perching on the edge of the bathroom counter near the sink. His hand slides up under her nightgown, palm flat and warm as it moves over her thigh and Peg realizes that she could _never_ forget how to do this, not ever. 

By the time Hawkeye appears in the bedroom and hovers there in the bathroom door, staring, Peg is leaning back hard against the mirror, moaning BJ’s name as his fingers move in tight, close circles against her. 

“So. You took me very literally, I see,” Hawkeye says, voice hoarse. 

Peg falls forward against BJ, her forehead pressed against his still-moving shoulder, and laughs in giddy relief. It’s good to be home. \--

Three weeks later, Madeline calls. Hawkeye is the first one to reach the phone and he answers it too casually (an unidentifiable “hello?”), expecting the coordinator of the veteran’s hospital, perhaps. More and more, lately, Hawkeye’s hours at the part-time placement have expanded. Peg figures that BJ’s right--it won’t be long until Hawkeye has a full time job there. Considering how he comes home after his shifts--grinning and animated, excited to talk about the improvements he’s seen so far in his patients’ health--Peg is glad.

Hawkeye hums in acknowledgement over the line, responding to the caller with a strange, awkward terseness. His eyes keep flickering over to Peg as he listens and speaks. Perhaps that should be a clue as to the caller’s identity, but Peg truly never expected to hear from Maddie again.

When Hawkeye silently hands her the phone without a word of explanation, Peg still obligingly takes the receiver, confused. “Hello?”

“Hey, kid. How’s the sunny shores of Cali?”

Peg’s breath leaves her all in a rush. “Oh,” she says, softly. “I...hello.” She isn’t sure what to say. There’s too much _to_ say. Primarily, she wants to apologize. But also she wants to express her gratitude. But also she wants to explain herself. But also--.

“Sorry it took me so long to call,” Maddie says, breaking through Peg’s frantic thoughts. “I only got back a week or so ago, and with me being away for so long, there was a lot of work to catch up on. I’ve been pulling 20-hour shifts at the factory since the second I stepped back into the city, feels like.”

Ah, a cue. “I’m so sorry to have disrupted your life like that.”

“Nah, don’t worry about it. My auntie and uncle have been wanting me to come visit their farm for years. It was nice, actually. First vacation I’ve had since--well, maybe ever. I needed it.”

Peg isn’t sure how to respond now that her main apology has found no traction. She’s always found Maddie so easy to talk to. It hurts that it’s not simple, anymore, that she’s ruined their friendship so utterly that their rapport has been lost.

“Hey,” Maddie says. “Thanks for the enormous gift basket. I’m still eating the muffins out of that thing, and I probably will be for weeks.”

“You’re welcome. Thank _you_ for--.” For...taking me in when I was at the end of my rope? For allowing yourself to be ousted from your home for months on end so that my boys and their professional friend could turn your apartment into a psych ward because--.

“ _Peggy,_ ” Madeline says, and even in her current state of mind, Peg can’t fail to notice the fondness dripping off of every exasperated syllable. “You’re my best friend, you know. I’d do a lot more for you than pack a bag and take a vacation, if you wanted.”

Peg feels her heart clench. “Would you come visit us? Not-not immediately. I’m sure you have plenty of work to catch up on. But the next time you can take the time off--would you?” 

_I want you to see my life, now_ , Peg thinks. _I want you to see that I’m OK. I want to see you in this place, where I’m loved and comfortable. I want you to be a part of all of this, even if only for a few days._

Maddie is quiet for a while. “Peg,” she says, slowly. “I’d love that, you know I would. But I don’t know if--.”

“BJ and Hawkeye think you’re wonderful,” Peg interrupts. “And Erin will love you. How could she not?”

“I think if I came over there, I wouldn’t want to leave,” her friend says, all in a rush.

Peg considers this very seriously. They have an open, useless guest room just waiting for someone to live in it. And she’s almost certain they could, eventually, if it ever came to it, push another mattress up against their current bed. 

“I wouldn’t mind that.”

Maddie laughs. It’s a gentle but humorless sound. “I can’t leave my girls hanging. The factory would fall all to pieces without me.” 

Peg nods. She’d expected that response, for all of her daydreaming. “Then maybe I could...come and see you again, sometime? But I’ll tell the boys, this time. And I’ll keep my sanity the whole time I’m there, I promise.”

Maddie’s laugh is genuine, now. “You’re welcome at my place any time you want, kid. Sane as a bishop or mad as a hatter, it makes no difference to me. I just want you to be happy.”

Peg’s smile is so bright she’s almost certain Maddie can feel the warmth of it over the phone. “You’re my best friend, too, Mads. In case I didn’t make that clear before.”

“I know. But thanks for saying it, anyway. Look, Peg, I gotta run.”

“Hot date?”

“Overheating boilers, more likely. Gotta keep the new girls from touching the damn things while they’re running. I swear, they come to me more empty-headed with every passing year. I was never that dumb when I was their age.”

Peg snorts. “Good luck. Please don’t make anyone cry.”

“No promises. Call me later, okay?”

“You bet.”

Peg hangs up the receiver slowly, chewing her lip in thought. She turns and runs right into Hawkeye, who has apparently been lingering nearby the whole call.

“I thought you’d maybe need some moral support,” Hawkeye says, putting his hands up in a ‘please don’t kill me’ gesture. “...Also, did I mishear you or did you just try to invite Madeline to live in our den of iniquity?”

Peg rolls her eyes. “I thought BJ told you to stop calling our _very nice home_ that.”

“He did. But BJ isn’t here, so I can call it whatever I want. Seriously, did you?”

“I did,” Peg admits. “I didn’t think either of you would really mind. And it doesn’t matter, anyway. She turned it down. She doesn’t want to leave Chicago.”

Hawkeye muses this over thoughtfully. “She might, someday, you know.” 

Peg shrugs.

“You should talk to Beej and me about decisions like that. Hey--don’t glare! I don’t mind, you’re right. And BJ probably wouldn’t, either. But it’s part of our deal, isn’t it? Another person moving in--even into the bedroom across the hall--for the long term is...a lot. And we’re only just finding our own footing, right now.”

Peg sighs and leans back against the refrigerator door, slumping. “I know. I’m sorry. I got caught up in the moment. I just...I want everyone I love to be in one place, sometimes.”

Hawkeye smiles crookedly. He’s had his own experience of living like sardines with a hundred of his closest friends and found-family members. He remembers how wonderful it can be--and also how annoying. “Any time you want to put ‘Peg in Chicago’ on the community calendar, all you have to do is ask,” he reminds her, gently. 

“I know. Thank you.”

“I’m glad you two are still friendly. Really.”

Peg smiles, all worries about the state of her friendship forgotten. “Me, too.”

\--

She calls Sidney Freedman, sometimes. Hawkeye has his new, local psychiatrist and that seems to be working well for him. Peg, however, struggles. Most of the doctors around them have odd, frightening ideas about what to do for women quote “prone to bouts of hysteria” unquote. Hell, it’s a miracle that they’d gotten out of that one particular doctor’s office without BJ putting his fist through the man’s patronizing smirk. The hunt goes on--Hawkeye is especially insistent that they keep trying--but Peg doesn’t expect success any time soon.

So, she calls Sidney. And Sidney, bless him, doesn’t even send a bill.

“Good morning, Peg,” Sidney says, voice smooth and mellow as usual. Her shoulders relax just to hear him speak. The connection isn’t the best--Sidney is in New York, after all, a long way from their seaside California home--but the static doesn’t bother her overmuch. 

“Hello,” she says, while her thoughts try to work themselves into words. That’s something she learned early on during her time with Sidney, as far back as their sessions in Chicago. Words--as wonderful as they are--cannot always easily express what Peg thinks and feels. 

“Erin’s going to Kindergarten in a few days,” she says, after a moment of companionable silence on the line. “And my degree program starts next week.”

“That sounds exciting for both of you. How are you feeling about it?”

“Nervous,” Peg says immediately, because that one is easy. “But all right, I think. I’m ready to be a student, again. I don’t know what I will do after the program is over, exactly, but I know that I’ve missed the classroom. And most of the students won’t even be that much younger than I am, since it’s an upper-level degree and everything.”

“Would it bother you, if your peers were younger?”

“No. I mean, maybe a bit. It’s just easier to connect with people who have similar life experiences, I suppose.”

“And are you worried about connecting with other students?”

Peg sighs. Sidney can be so merciless, sometimes. “Yes. You know I don’t make friends easily. Not really. What if I spend the whole semester sitting by myself? I know it sounds childish but what if the other students don’t like me?”

She can hear Sidney’s small huff of amusement. “You should give them a chance, at least.”

“I know your style of practice pushes for your patients to get back on the horse and-and--forgive the on-the-nose metaphor but ‘back into the trenches’--as soon as possible. But sometimes I wish you’d just let me turn tail and run.”

Sidney hums softly. “Is that what you want to do? Will you be happier if you quit?”

“...Probably not.”

“Then how could I possibly suggest you run away? Give it a chance, Peg. You know if you decide to withdraw later that BJ and Hawkeye will support your decision.” 

“But what will I _do_ with myself if I drop out?”

“I think that’s a question that you should save in the event it’s actually relevant.”

“‘Don’t borrow trouble,’” Peg quotes. She’s been told that her whole life. She’s almost sick of hearing it. “I know. It’s just so much easier to expend all of my worrying on something that doesn’t matter than things that do.”

Sidney’s silence speaks volumes. Oh. She’s just stumbled on the answer, it seems.

“...I’m not actually worried about going back school, am I?” she asks, tentatively.

“Maybe not,” he agrees. “So, what are you actually afraid of?”

“Erin?” Peg blurts out, uncertainly. “Oh. _Erin_. What if the other kids are mean to her? She doesn’t get to spend as much time as she should with other children. BJ and I don’t have many other parents as acquaintances. She spends most of her time with the three of us or with my parents. What if she’s too--what if she’s too _odd_? What if the teacher asks her about her family? What will she say? What if she says something...something--.”

“Have you talked to Erin about how to respond when adults ask about your homelife?”

“Yes. Probably more than we need to, really. She doesn’t call Hawkeye anything but ‘Uncle,’ sometimes, and I don’t think she’d ever explain our sleeping arrangements to anyone, not even to my parents.”

“But--?”

“But she might forget. Or she might--god, it’s horrible that she has to lie about us, isn’t it? What are we teaching her?”

Another heavy silence. Not about Erin’s schooling, either, then. This is something else, some other, deeper concern that’s been quietly, sneakily tying Peg into knots for days.

“Hawkeye’s been reading all the bedtime stories since we got back,” Peg says, slowly. “And sometimes I listen in. Because it’s so cute, and because--well, he doesn’t always feel good about being left alone with her. And a few nights ago, he was reading her a fairytale. Cinderella, I think. And when he got to the ending part when she marries the prince, Erin turned to him and--.”

She twists the phone cord around and around her fingers, falling silent. 

“What did Erin say, Peg?” Sidney prompts. Peg imagines him sitting slightly forward on his chair, sensing a breakthrough like a bloodhound. 

“She asked him when he and BJ were going to get married.”

Peg expects Sidney to laugh. _She’d_ laughed, at first. Especially at the stunned expression on Hawkeye’s face at the question. But now, it doesn’t seem as funny. Sidney doesn’t laugh. He makes a small noise of understanding, instead.

“How did Hawkeye react?”

“He was surprised by the question, just like me. You know how he is, though. He made a joke, I think. I don’t remember exactly what. The moment passed. It didn’t come up again.”

“But it bothers you?”

Peg chews at her lip. “No. Yes. Not for--not the question itself. It’s...it’s just not fair, is it? BJ loved me first, but he loves Hawkeye _best--_ oh, it’s all right; I’m not upset about that, not really. They have a very special relationship. I understand that. It’s just...BJ and Hawkeye couldn’t get married even if I wasn’t involved. And that’s--it’s--.” She pauses, forcing the words to work with her. “I want Erin to be able to talk freely about her family to her teachers. I want to be able to think about the possibility of Erin hosting a sleepover without breaking into a cold sweat, wondering how to keep our secret with so many children running about in the house. I want what we have between us to be just as unremarkable and normal as the relationship of every other parent.”

“But that’s not the reality,” Sidney reminds her, very gently.

“No. It isn’t. And I’m afraid that--well. Do you think Hawkeye feels left out?”

Sidney sighs. He doesn’t often do that. Good thing, too, because it makes Peg squirm. She feels like she’s disappointed him, and that hurts. She hates being a disappointment.

“Peg,” he says, with the patient tone of someone who is repeating a line often told, “You’re _not_ responsible for Hawkeye’s feelings. And you certainly can’t expend all of your own emotional energy worrying about whether or not he’s upset about something.”

“I know,” Peg says, which is what she always says when Sidney reminds her of this. She _does_ know. But she can’t seem to stop the impulse, even now that she can recognize and understand it as something detrimental to her own health.

“You should talk to Hawkeye about this concern,” Sidney suggests. “Determine what he is actually feeling--and if it’s a problem, you can work together to solve it.”

“Oh, but what if I just make it worse by asking?” Peg asks.

“You won’t know until you’ve tried,” Sidney says. 

_Don’t borrow trouble,_ Peg thinks to herself again, resigned. “All right.”

“Peggy?”

She blinks, thrown by the rare use of her nickname. “Yes?”

“I’ve been asking around, reaching out to some old colleagues. I have the name of a doctor in your area whom I think would be good for you. Would you be interested?”

Peg frowns. “Oh. Well. I suppose so.”

“You wouldn’t have to stop calling me, you know,” he says. “I’m always happy to get a call from a friend. Hawkeye calls all the time, just to chat.”

“‘Just to chat’,” Peg echoes, uncertainly. 

“I really think this doctor is a good fit for you,” Sidney says. “Please, at least call her office.”

 _Her_? Peg sits up a bit straighter. “I will,” she promises. “...And I’m going to go talk to Hawkeye right now about my concerns. Thanks, Sidney.”

“Any time. Take care. And, Peg?”

“Yes?”

“The other kids will love Erin. And the other students at the college will love you, too. And if they don’t, they’ll answer to me.”

She smiles. 

\--

She corners Hawkeye in the living room. He’s barefoot and lounging on the couch, his nose in a book she’s almost certain he’s read at least twice before. She sits on the arm of the couch near his toes and waits to be acknowledged.

He looks up after a few seconds, closing the pages on a finger. “Uh-oh. You’ve got that certain look about you. Is this going to be a long conversation? It’s fine, if so, but I’ll need to find an actual bookmark.”

She leans forward, plucks the book from his hands, and promptly dog-ears the page he was on. She ignores Hawkeye’s only partially feigned gasp of horror. They’re _her_ books. She can do what she likes to their pages. They don’t mind.

“I need to talk to you about Erin’s bedtime story.”

Hawkeye blinks and sits up, swinging his feet over to the floor. He grabs Peg by the wrist and tugs her gently after him. She falls gracefully onto the couch cushions and burrows herself against his side. It’s going to be that sort of talk, after all. His arm goes around her and gives her shoulders a squeeze. “All right. Is it the character voices? Because I swear I’m doing my best with them. I’m a doctor, not an actor. I can only do three accents, and two of them are probably too offensive to use in any company, let alone in the presence of tiny ears. Speaking of, do you want to hear my German? It’s really terrible.”

“ _Hawk,_ ” she sighs. This does nothing for his obvious nervousness--he’s twisting his fingers in his lap--but it does stop the words flowing out of his mouth. She herself falls silent, unsure how to continue. 

For the first time, Hawkeye seems to realize that she’s not angry but is, in fact, as anxious as he is. He frowns, brows drawing in. He stops fiddling with his hands and pulls her fingers into his own, interlacing them. “What’s wrong?”

“Do you feel left out because--because Erin can’t acknowledge you properly? Because BJ and I are married and you just...just--?”

“--Just hang around, taking up space in your house?” Hawkeye provides for her, voice discordant with the too-bright smile of a man hiding pain.

Peg grimaces. “Yes, I suppose.”

Hawkeye considers. “My name is on the calendar just like everyone else’s” he says, after a while. “The school has me down as Erin’s third emergency contact. Her teachers know my face and understand that I might be the one picking her up and dropping her off, some days. I read to her at night and help feed her when necessary. I wipe her nose when she cries and deal with her blows when she’s having a tantrum and--that’s what dads do, right? It’s what my dad did for me, anyway.”

Peg squeezes his hand. “I never doubted that you’re just as much a parent to Erin as the rest of us. I don’t doubt that you’re just as much a part of this family as any one of us. I didn’t mean--.”

“I know what you mean. I’m trying to tell you how I feel about it. I _feel_ like Erin’s dad. I feel like your husband. I feel like Beej’s spouse.” Hawkeye shakes his head slightly, frustrated. “I don’t need some governmental piece of paper to tell me what I am. They’ve done that to me enough already. I don’t feel left out just because society as a whole can’t--won’t--acknowledge what role I play in this household. I don’t care. As long as the school lets me be there when Erin needs me, as long as nobody out there in the world tries to stick their noses in our business or break us apart--I just don’t give a damn.”

“Erin might want to have friends over, eventually,” Peg says, slowly.

“I’ll sleep in the guest bed, then. Or I can get some more hours in at work, if you want me gone completely.”

“I _don’t,_ ” Peg says, frustrated herself. “That’s what I mean. I don’t want you to have to change.”

“Peg, spending a few hours out from underfoot so Erin can have a playdate is the _least_ I’d be willing to do to protect what we’ve built together.”

“That’s not the point,” Peg argues. She’s getting more angry than nervous, now. Hawkeye lets go of her hand accordingly, allows her to cross her arms over her chest in defiance of an invisible opponent. 

“It’s only sometimes,” Hawkeye says, gently. “I can handle sometimes. It only changes what’s on the surface, anyway. It won’t change what we really are.”

“Erin will want you to meet her friends. You’re the one she’ll want to invite to their tea parties. The rest of us don’t pour the tea right, apparently.”

Hawkeye blows out an exasperated breath. “Then I’ll stay and play with them, if it comes to that. Peg, haven’t you been talking to Sidney about the importance of not leaping ahead and worrying about hypotheticals?”

Peg frowns at him. “Yes,” she says, snippily. “That’s why we’re talking right now, in fact. He told me to work it out with you personally.”

“Oh. He passed the buck, in other words.”

Peg shoots him a very dark look. He smiles at her apologetically. She is not mollified. 

“I’m not upset,” Hawkeye insists. “I’m not feeling abandoned or-or ignored or whatever you thought might be bothering me. I’m fine. I was having a pretty good morning, actually. Me, alone, with that book you’re holding hostage.”

Peg glances at the book’s unremarkable cover. She hands it over to him. “...Will you read some of it to me?”

Hawkeye takes the book and looks at her with some suspicion. “That’s it? This conversation is done? Your mind is at ease?”

“My mind is never at ease,” Peg says, faux-dramatically. “But, yes. I feel better than I did earlier. Now read to me, please.”

Hawkeye stretches back out on the couch, pulling her on top of him. She rests her head on his chest and he puts his arms up on her shoulder, reading over her. His voice is soothing and his words well-spoken, even if he doesn’t use any voices, potentially offensive or otherwise.

\--

When BJ comes home from work, they’re still stretched out on the couch. The difference being that Erin is sprawled on top of it with them, and Hawkeye and Peg are taking turns reading out of a dense book of fairytales. Hawkeye does the narrative bits. Peg does the voices. BJ sets his jacket and bag aside and comes around the couch to peek over their heads at the book. He takes over the voices for Peg as the tale winds down to the standard happily-ever-after; Peg is much more skilled at character voices than Hawkeye, but she cannot achieve the same low, menacing growl of the dragon that BJ can.

When Hawkeye says ‘the end’ in a booming, dramatic voice, BJ leans forward and kisses him on the forehead. “Hello, family,” he says, grinning under his mustache. 

Erin bounces up--her small, bare feet planted firmly on Hawkeye’s knees--and leans heavily over Hawkeye’s face, reaching out to her father. “Pick me up!”

BJ picks her up and gives her a spin. He won’t be able to do that much longer. Erin is nearly six years old, now, and she’s right at the top of her age percentile for height and weight. She’s going to be tall as her daddy, no mistake.

Hawkeye rubs at his abused knees and stands up from the couch himself. Peg makes piteous noises until he rolls his eyes, holding his hands out to her and tugging her bodily to her own feet.

It’s Hawkeye’s night to make dinner, which means that he’ll probably boil pasta and use the frozen tomato sauce Peg made a few weekends back. Peg watches him as he darts around the kitchen, crooning some vaguely familiar ballad all the while. Erin and BJ set the table, BJ handing the plates and silverware to Erin one piece a time, praising her when she places the forks and spoons just so. Peg herself does as she always does when it’s not her night to cook; she perches on the edge of the kitchen counter--out of the chef’s way, of course--and reads.

“What’s the book?” Hawkeye asks, breaking off mid lyric and sticking an obscene amount of reheated sauce into his mouth to “taste” it, as if Peg hadn’t already tasted it ages ago, as if they hadn’t just eaten a batch of that same sauce last week. He smells it, too, but that bothers Peg less. Hawkeye always smells food and drink before consuming it. BJ says he used to do it at the camp, too, but Peg doesn’t figure it for a war-time habit. It’s far too practiced, too engrained. He’s been sniffing his food since childhood, at least. She wants to know why--Peg _always_ wants to know why, when to comes to Hawkeye--but she’s never asked.

Peg, in a gesture known by avid readers everywhere, lifts up the book so he can see the cover and then keeps silently reading.

Hawkeye snorts at her but obligingly reads the title himself. “ _The Fellowship of the Ring…_? That doesn’t sound like required reading for your coursework.”

Peg has, admittedly, been making a habit of reading the books listed in her course syllabi ahead of time. The book currently in her hands is, as Hawkeye guesses, not one of them.

“It’s a sequel to _The Hobbit_ ,” Peg says, breezily. “It’s been out for a while, now, but I never got around to it. There’s two others.”

“Leisure reading a trilogy, huh?” BJ says, from his place near the dining table. He helps to steady a glass as Erin sets it precariously on top of the rim of a plate. He’s going for casual, but Peg can hear the question under his words: ‘Why aren’t you reading for classes, anymore?’

“Well, I don’t plan to read all three at once. I just...wanted a break.”

Peg _knows_ that BJ and Hawkeye are trading glances over her head, even with her own eyes trained on the pages of her book. She’s read the same line about ten times during the course of this awkward conversation. She forces herself to move on, even though she can’t remember what said sentence was about, and it’s probably an important one.

“Peg,” Hawkeye says, carefully, “If you want to talk about school--.”

“It’s not a problem,” Peg interrupts, cooly. She turns the page, even though she’s not ready to turn the page, yet. “It’s fine.”

Hawkeye crosses the kitchen and comes to stand in front of her, bracketing her own crossed legs with his feet. She ignores him until she no longer can stand it. When she looks up, she finds a red-dipped wooden spoon held inches from her lips. “I think it needs more garlic,” Hawkeye says.

Peg sighs. “It doesn’t. You always say that, but it doesn’t. You’re the opposite of a vampire. Your enduring love for enormous amounts of garlic is horrible and obscene.” 

He keeps staring at her with wide, puppy eyes. She licks the spoon. “All right,” she says, resignedly. “But only a few more cloves! That’s it!”

BJ and Erin share a giggle at Uncle Hawkeye’s antics. Peg resists the urge to glare at them. It’s not kind to glare at one’s spouse and child.

Hawkeye peels and chops up more garlic and throws it into the simmering pan. They’ll have to wait even longer for dinner, now, but Peg doesn’t actually mind. Her stomach is in knots. The boys are right. She’s still nervous about school--both for herself and Erin. Talking through her larger anxieties with Sidney has helped, but she can’t stop fretting over it, anyway. 

She loved being a student, but that had been so long ago. What if she doesn’t like it as much, now? And what can she possibly _do_ with a higher-level degree in literature, anyway?

She jumps a little in surprise as BJ leans over the narrow, floating countertop and gives her a tight hug from behind. “I can hear the wheels churning from here,” he murmurs against her ear. She shivers reflexively. “What’s up?”

“An existential crisis, maybe,” Peg says, unhappily. It bothers her to think on it, sometimes, how easy it used to be to just...live her life. But, as her talks with Sidney have slowly revealed, that’s not strictly true. She’s _always_ been this way--overly worried, overly methodical (mountains of to-do lists haunt her to this day), and afraid of abandonment. It’s just that she’d never acknowledged it all before. She hadn’t had the vocabulary. She’d just...pushed it aside. Now, she’s more self-aware and catching up on thirty-some years of balled up fears and concerns. It’s monumentally difficult to experience and even more impossible to explain. 

Hawkeye turns from the stove and shoots her a wry, sympathetic look. If anyone can understand exactly what she’s thinking, it’s him. She wonders how it must have been for him, to have lived one’s whole life casually repressing everything that hurt too much, only to have it all rise back up, unwanted and unmanageable, while thousands of miles and dozens of years from the incident itself. She knows--through Hawkeye and Sidney both--about Billy and the attempted drowning and how it made Hawkeye sick during the war. She knows at least some of the details, now, of the ‘chicken’ and the bus. She doesn’t know, exactly, the details behind the death of Hawkeye’s mother, but she...she suspects that there is more to it than Hawkeye consciously remembers, even now. And she thinks he suspects there’s more there, too. He simply doesn’t dare to poke at that particular house of cards too hard for fear of what he’ll find when it falls.

“Here, taste this,” Hawkeye says, pushing a newly garnished spoonful of sauce at her. At this rate, there will be none left for the the actual spaghetti. She frowns at him. “No one can eat pasta and have a nervous breakdown at the same time,” Hawkeye insists, “that’s medical fact. Eat it.”

Peg tilts the whole spoonful of warm, tomato-y sauce into her mouth and swallows obligingly. She does, actually, feel a bit better. She’s even more at ease when Hawkeye puts down the wooden spoon and embraces her from the front, wrapping his arms over where BJ’s still loop around her waist. The embrace is smothering and warm and far too heavy against her body, and she loves it.

From somewhere near Hawkeye’s knees, Erin says, hopefully, “Is it time to eat, now?”

\--

A girl--and _girl_ she must be called, as she can’t be any older than nineteen--in Peg’s morning class passes her a note across the aisle. Peg opens the innocuous piece of paper with her heart in her throat, convinced that she’s about to be the target of some hideous insult about her age, her attire, the way she’s sitting too quiet and too twitchy in her chair. Instead, the note bears--in a brash, looping hand--a doodle of a smiling face and a few sentences, sans any notable punctuation:

_Hi my name is Cassandra I love your shoes SO much where did you get them_

_PS do you want to be partners for todays group project theres always a group assignment in this class my friend Patricia took it last semester and she told me so_

Peg smiles and turns the page over, scribbling her response quickly back:

_Hi, Cassandra. It’s nice to meet you! These shoes were a gift from a friend--I don’t know where he got them, sorry! I love your sweater--the brass buttons are gorgeous! YES, I would love to be partners. Did Patricia tell you how many tests Dr. Ackerman gives? The syllabus is shockingly sparse on the subject, and I need to know so I can schedule my study breaks properly._

_P.S.: My name is Peg._

\-- 

Peg returns home to an empty house with just enough time to tidy up and make Erin an afterschool snack (apple slices arranged in a pleasingly precise circle on a small, floral plate) before Erin herself bounds through the front door with BJ on her heels.

Peg scoops her baby girl up and gives her a gentle swing around. Erin’s feet barely lift off the floor, but she still squeals in delight. “How was school, Bunny?” Peg asks, even as Erin offers a delighted “How was school, Mommy?” back. Peg sets Erin on her feet and shoos her toward the apples. If Erin doesn’t eat between the end of school and their often very late dinner, she gets cranky. Peg would prefer that no one be cranky, today.

“School was _wonderful_ , my darling. Mommy learned a lot and she even made some friends! And you?”

Erin crams an entire apple slice into her mouth and talks while she chews. Peg grimaces and mentally blames Hawkeye for this newfound bad habit. 

“Chew and swallow, first,” BJ advises as he sits down beside Erin at the table and, grinning at her, steals a piece of apple.

Erin obediently chews and swallows before crying out “Daddy!” in a tone of pure censure. By then, though, the apple slice has disappeared into his mouth and cannot be returned. Erin sighs her most long-suffering sigh and looks to her mother.

“May I please have more apple? I got thieved.”

BJ snorts a laugh, nearly choking on his ill gotten gains in the process.

Peg plucks another apple from the bowl and cuts two neat slices from it, placing them in the circle shape on Erin’s plate to fill in the gap. “How was school?” she reminds.

Erin goes to pick up another apple slice but, remembering the rule about talking with full mouths, pauses mid-motion. “It was good! I painted _three_ pictures and Ms. Monarch put them all on the board so now everyone can see them. And Winifred pushed a boy at recess and got in trouble. And she said it wasn’t fair she got in trouble, but I told her it was ‘cos, uhm.” She pauses, face scrunching up as she tries to remember the exact phrasing, “‘Violence is not a vi-ah-bul solution to problems; it only makes more violence.’” 

BJ snorts again. Peg looks at him, mystified.

“Hawkeye,” BJ says, and that, indeed, is explanation enough. “He’s bound and determined to prevent any future wars directly at the source. He’s going to make pacifists of every child he meets from now until the end of his days, I think.”

Peg sighs. She doesn’t think Hawkeye is in the wrong, necessarily. Still, she wishes that Erin wasn’t _quite_ so keen on committing to memory every piece of advice the man gives her. Just a few days previously, Erin had solemnly declared that she could not in good conscience allow Peg to drink her morning coffee because recent studies had shown that caffeine had an adverse reaction on people who suffered from anxiety. (What she’d actually said was “Mommy, no, it’ll make you _twitchy_!” but Peg could recognize the source’s true rhetoric clearly enough).

That same morning, as Hawkeye had stumbled heavy-lidded and tousled toward the coffee pot, Peg had obstructed his path and--smiling sweetly--handed him a steaming cup of decaf herbal tea, instead. She hasn’t heard any anti-caffeine propaganda from either the doctor or her daughter since. 

The point stands.

“I’m glad you spoke so honestly to Winifred about your feelings, honey. But, next time, maybe just let Ms. Monarch determine the standards of morality in her classroom, ok?”

Erin shrugs. “Ok.”

BJ looks at his daughter with a thoughtful expression. “Why did Winnie push the boy?”

Peg shoots him a look. He smiles at her, not at all apologetic.

Erin pokes at her remaining apple slices, disrupting the circle. Peg tries not to let the lopsided new arrangement bother her. “He called her a mean name. And he told her redheads are demons.”

BJ’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “Well. I bet that made her pretty angry.”

“Yeah. It did. I got angry, too.”

“But you didn’t push anybody,” BJ says, leadingly.

Erin’s guilty expression is impossible to misinterpret or ignore. She has no capacity for lying whatsoever. Peg hopes, in a selfish little part of herself, that obfuscation is something Uncle Hawkeye never manages to teach her. “Well,” Erin says, drawing the word out and squirming a bit in her seat.

“Erin Angelica Hunnicutt,” Peg says, severely. “Did you push that boy?”

“No, I didn’t push him,” Erin says, immediately. Then, after a pause. “I punched him.” While Peg covers her face with her hands and BJ stifles another snort of laughter, Erin pops an apple slice in her mouth and chews loudly with full, hamster-like cheeks.

\--

Peg takes it upon herself to call Ms. Monarch and the parents of the boy in question and explain her daughter’s actions.

“No one saw her do it,” BJ says, speaking slowly, as if puzzling it out as he talks. “She made the swing first and _then_ Winifred pushed him when he tried to swing back at her. And only Winnie got caught. Poor kid.”

“Please don’t tell me you think we shouldn’t say anything about it just because there were no witnesses.”

BJ shrugs. “Honestly, I’m not sure what we should do. I sure wish that Parenting 101 manual would come in the mail, already. It’s been backordered for years.”

Peg does not smile at this jest. “This isn’t good, BJ. Our daughter can’t become a bully.”

“Well, technically, since she was defending her friend--.”

“ _BJ_.”

“All right! You’re right. Of course you are. This is just...it’s still strange to me. It feels like just yesterday she was a tiny baby. I could hold almost all of her in my two hands together. Now she’s a grown child, getting into tussles on the playground. Where does the time go?”

Peg makes the calls. Erin is retroactively punished. She’ll have to stay after school tomorrow and--with Ms. Monarch’s help, being as Erin is only six--write a letter of apology to the boy she’d hit. It’s a fair and just sentence, but the fact it needs to be made at all has Peg wound up tight inside. It doesn’t help that Erin needing to stay late after school throws a large wrench in the next day’s schedule. Hawkeye may have to be late for his shift at the hospital. BJ will be in San Francisco, and Peg herself has an afternoon class that goes into the early evening. Peg was supposed to pick Erin up and drop her off at her parents’ on her way to campus, but now she cannot. Hawkeye loves his patients and takes his schedule very seriously; he shouldn’t have this life disrupted for Erin’s sake. Peg stares, hollow-eyed, at the rainbow colored chart and rearranges it a dozen times in her head, trying to make necessary changes without interrupting the natural flow of anyone’s lives.

“Hey. Beej told me what happened. You doing ok?”

Peg jumps at the sound of Hawkeye’s voice. She hadn’t noticed him returning home.

“I...can’t figure out how to fix it,” she tells him, pointing at the calendar. Hawkeye follows her finger. 

“May I?” Hawkeye asks. Peg gives him the pen and watches, worriedly, as Hawkeye bumps his shift up twenty minutes and then tacks twenty minutes on at the end of it. It does, in fact, solve the problem, but he won’t get home until after Erin’s bedtime, now. He won’t be able to read her bedtime story.

Peg shakes her head, but Hawkeye interrupts her protestations with a wave of his hand. “It’s one story. You do the voices better, anyway. I don’t mind. And Erin won’t, either. The schedule is going to have to be changed, from time to time. So it won’t always be ideal; it’s OK. We can manage. All of us.”

“But--.”

“Peggy,” Hawkeye says, pulling her toward him into a loose embrace. “How was school?”

Peg, despite herself, huffs a laugh into his shoulder. “Well. I didn’t punch anyone.”

Hawkeye laughs. “At least _someone_ is listening to my lessons about conflict resolution.”

She pinches his arm in reply.

\--

Peggy takes a deep breath before turning the phone dial, and another while it rings through. “Dr. Patel’s office, how may I help you?”

“Hello,” Peggy says, wrapping the phone wire around and around her finger. “I’d like to make an appointment, please. My name is Margaret--Peggy--Hunnicutt. I’m a new patient.”

“Good morning, Mrs. Hunnicutt. I just need some information from you and then we can set you up, all right?”

Peg nods before she remembers she cannot be seen. “All right.” And it’s remarkably easy, after that.

Dr. Patel is a very tall, very broad woman in her late forties. She has long, black hair pulled back in a serious-looking bun and the kind of dark, knowing eyes that Peggy has come to subconsciously associate with all mental health professionals. When she speaks, Dr. Patels words swing up and down in a musical cadence, tempered with an accent that she herself calls a “smish-smash” of vowel and consonant sounds cobbled together from her Indian childhood, her British adolescents, and her Bostonian education. 

“Good morning, Mrs. Hunnicutt.”

“Oh, please, call me Peggy. Or Peg.”

“Peg, then. You’re welcome to call me Beverly, if you wish.”

“Okay.”

Silence falls between them for a while. Peg finds herself missing Sidney Freedman’s reassuringly familiar presence more than ever. She’d been hopeful, at first, at the prospect of speaking with a fellow woman--a doctor who would most likely not dismiss her based on her gender alone. Now, though, she worries that a shared sex does not an actual connection make. How can she possibly open up to this stranger?

 _You spilled out practically your whole life story to Maddie not even a full day after you’d met. It’s not being open you’re scared of, Peg. It’s the part that comes after_.

“I know it all feels very awkward, at first. It’s difficult, speaking with someone new. You shouldn’t push yourself if you are uncomfortable at the start. It’s perfectly normal for my first few sessions with a patient to be mostly silence. Or small talk, if you prefer.”

Peg smiles softly as the doctor seemingly reads her thoughts. Maybe there is some connection to build on here, after all. “I know it sounds silly, considering, but...I just don’t want you to think I’m crazy.”

Dr. Patel’s smile is reserved but genuine. “Dr. Freedman’s notes indicate that you have been suffering from symptoms of mild anxiety for a very long time, and you’ve recently had a series of experiences that has worsened the effects.”

“...So you already _know_ I’m crazy, is that what you’re saying?”

“I’m saying that you are a young woman with a mental illness who has only recently been diagnosed and is understandably struggling to accept and cope with said diagnosis. It’s understandable that this has only recently come to light, Peg. The greater medical community has just begun to understand and define disorders like the one you are suffering from. Even if you had been aware of the problem ten years ago and tried to find help, assistance would not have been available to you as it is today.”

Peg considers this. “Sidney says that the new go-to solution for the kind of problems I’m having is a prescription. Usually for tranquilizers.”

Dr. Patel takes a few notes. She has lovely, clear handwriting and Peg can read it upside down with ease. ‘May be interested in medication.’

“I’m not, actually,” Peg says, pointing at the pad. Dr. Patel lifts a brow and carefully tips the pad more closely to her chest, out of Peg’s line of sight. 

“Why not?” Dr. Patel asks, her tone betraying nothing. Peg bets she’d be really good at poker, too, and finds herself wondering if the good doctor and Dr. Freedman have ever played against one another. Moreover, she wonders who won.

“I-I just don’t want to be one of _those_ mothers. You hear about it all the time, especially here in California. ‘Mother’s little helpers,’ they call those things. I wouldn’t want to become dependant on them. It’s...it’s not who I want to be. My daughter’s friends, many of their mothers--I don’t mean to judge them, but--.”

Dr. Patel merely nods her understanding. “They do have side effects that some would not find worth the benefits. And, between you and me, I don’t think we’re at that point, yet. It’s all right, Peg. You don’t have to take the medication if you don’t want to. There are many other options. Sidney has indicated that you are already feeling better, now that you are home and have developed a new routine. How is that working for you?”

Peg considers the so-called ‘community calendar’ and the recent problem with Erin’s detention. “It works all right, when we can stick to it. Sometimes our plans have to be changed. Sometimes they change very last minute and everyone ends up scrambling to get where they need to be on time. That’s when it’s harder for me. I hate--there’s always at least one person who falls through the cracks, when the schedule breaks like that. Someone ends up having a bad day.”

“Bad days do happen, even when well planned and prepared for,” Patel agrees. “How do the members of your family feel when these schedule changes occur?”

Peg smiles ruefully. “I think mostly they end up worrying about the effect it's having on me more than on themselves. Poor Erin--my daughter, she’s six--adapts very quickly because she doesn’t want to make a fuss and upset me. I dont--she’s a child, you see. She should be allowed to be disappointed about things like missing ballet lessons because Daddy needs to work and Mommy is at school. But if she is upset, she doesn’t say so. She just goes to my mom and dad’s for the night without a word of complaint.”

“She seems like a very intelligent and empathetic child.”

“She is. She’s been very patient with all of us through everything. I just...I feel guilty that she has to be so grown up so soon.”

“Have you spoken with her about this? Erin may be young, but that doesn’t mean you can’t communicate about these feelings with her just as you have been working to communicate more openly with your husband and Dr. Pierce.”

Peg looks up a bit sharply at Hawkeye’s name. Dr. Patel has at least some of Sidney’s notes. How much does she know? How much can she be trusted to know? How--?

Dr. Patel seems to read her mind yet again. Her smile is especially reserved, perhaps, but Peg isn’t made wary by it; her eyes remain kind. “I understand that Dr. Pierce plays an important role in your household. You know, it’s not uncommon in many cultures for extended and even combined families to live and work together under one roof. There’s a reason the phrase ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ exists.” For a moment, her professional attitude softens into something more personal and comforting. “I admit there have been many times throughout my own marriage when I have thought an extra adult would be handy--especially when my babies were young.”

Peg smiles warmly at this. “You have children?”

“Yes. Two twin girls. They’re not so little, anymore. They’re sophomores, now, attending Stanford.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful. I can’t even imagine Erin at that age. It seems so far away.”

“It will happen sooner than you think,” Patel says, solemnly. Then, back to business, “Let’s talk a little about how you can speak to Erin about your concerns, shall we?”

After that, Peg finds it much easier to speak freely with the doctor and allow herself to be heard. When she leaves the office, she stops at the receptionist’s desk and sets up another five appointments, all of which she looks forward to writing into the brightly colored calendar at home.

\--

Hawkeye’s book hits the ground with a dull thud. Peg half expects the muted noise to wake him up--it would have, just a few months ago--but all he does is groan softly and turn onto his side on the couch. Peg tip-toes forward, scoops up the lost book, and smiles when she sees the cover.

 _Wee Willie Winkie_ , as battered and well-read as she remembers. She’s not sure where Hawkeye managed to dig it up from, but it makes her feel warm in a way she cannot quite define to see the errant tangles of her thoughts about the man come ‘round full circle again. ““His full name was Percival William Williams,’” Peg murmurs to herself, holding the book close to her chest, “‘but he picked up the other name in a nursery-book, and that was the end of the christened titles.” “Big talk, coming from you, Ms. ‘Margaret’ Hadden,” Hawkeye yawns from the couch. 

“Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to wake you,” Peg says, guiltily. “And nobody as _ever_ actually called me Margaret, no matter what my birth certificate says.”

Hawkeye waves her off apology. “Don’t worry about it. It’s what I get for sleeping in the middle of the house. Where’s the rest of us?”

Peg warms at the casual use of the combined pronoun. “Erin wanted to see a movie. BJ wanted to get away from his paperwork for a while. It seemed like a winning combination.”

Hawkeye rubs a knuckle into his eye. “Mm, better him than me. You know, in Korea, I used to think constantly about all the movies--quality, brand-new movies--I’d go see once I got back stateside. I used to dream about having _choices_ and sitting in a real seat, eating popcorn that wasn’t stale, being able to neck in the back row without two dozen olive-green wearing Peeping Toms and Thomasina's breathing down my, well, my neck.” 

“But?”

“But, I don’t know. Ever since those days of crowding in the mess tent, watching _Clementine_ in jittery, thirty-second intervals interspersed with the 4077th Variety Show, the new stuff just doesn’t appeal.”

Peg prods Hawkeye’s legs out of the way and then sits down beside him. “You could still do the necking part,” Peg says, by way of reassurance.

Hawkeye waggles his eyebrows at her. “Oh, really?” he croons, leaning forward. Peg rolls her eyes, putting her hands up against his chest. He stops immediately, grinning at her, though, without shame.

“Do we look like we’re at the movies?”

“No, but if you turn on the radio and turn off the lights, we can pretend real hard.”

Peg kisses his nose and gives him an actual push back. “I’m not the sort for movie-theater necking,” she announces, primly. Then, she gives him a mischievous smile. “You’ll have to talk to BJ for that.”

Hawkeye laughs. “Oh, I bet our fellow movie-goers would _love_ that.” 

Peg smiles and fiddles with the pages of the book in her lap. Hawkeye points at it with an idle finger. “You know,” he says, “Kipling’s why I first felt friendly toward Beej.”

Peg blinks. She’s never heard this story from either man, before. “What do you mean?”

“Kipling,” he says, as if that’s the part that is confusing her. “Trapper had just left without a word, and I’d wrangled Radar into letting me tag along on his pick-up trip in the hopes of catching Trap before he left. But I missed Trapper by--.”

“--Ten lousy minutes. I know that part. You said as much at the reunion party, after giving Trapper a good slap.”

Hawkeye grins, perhaps a bit sheepish. “Well, he deserved it.”

“I thought ‘violence only begets more violence?’” 

“It does. Don’t you remember? After I gave Trapper a slap, he tweaked my nose.”

Peg had forgotten, actually. She laughs. “All right, point taken. I get it. Trapper left, you much later got your revenge--.”

“--And now he’s sending me letters like a normal, well-adjusted human being, yeah.”

Peg smiles. She’d been glad, in the aftermath of the party, to see how many of Hawkeye’s old friends had made a new, vigorous effort to keep in contact. Trapper is one of the few who has continued to keep in touch in the long term, and for that Peg is grateful. BJ has always been jealous of Trapper and Hawkeye’s closeness, Peg knows, but for her part she’s just happy that their inelegant parting has been rectified, at long last.

“What about _Kipling_?” Peg presses.

“Oh. Well, BJ had arrived and Radar was trying to introduce us and everything. But I wasn’t really paying any attention to him. I was too upset about Trapper. And, honestly, I probably wouldn’t have _ever_ paid Beej any mind at all--out of _spite_ , you know--except...I made a dumb joke, like usual. And BJ followed up on it by name dropping Kipling. And it was just--he wasn’t what I was prepared to write him off as, I suppose. Margaret and Frank had built him up as this perfect specimen of medical professionalism, ripe for the military treatment. But when he showed up, he was just the new kid at school who was in way over his head and making jokes about classic literature in a desperate attempt to make friends. And I loved him, at least a tiny bit, right that minute.”

Peg, to Hawkeye’s confusion, starts to giggle.

“What? What is it?”

Peg snorts, rubbing tears from the corners of her eyes before it can ruin her makeup. “Oh, Hawkeye. BJ didn’t know a _thing_ about Kipling until he met me. He’s a very smart and well-read man! But if he recognized Kipling in your joke, it’s only because of me. He thought I liked his work, you see, so he read a lot of it when we first started dating.”

Hawkeye taps his fingers against the cover of the worn out book in her lap. “ _Don’t_ you like Kipling?”

“Oh, he’s all right, I suppose. I only knew as much about him as I did because I wrote my senior thesis on some of his work. And, well.” She gives the book a little squeeze. “ _Wee Willie Winkie_ was the first book I ever read all on my own. That makes it special.”

“So, you’re saying BJ couldn’t have made the joke without you.”

Peg grins. “Exactly.”

Hawkeye’s own grin is full of the type of glee one sees often in individuals who have real, genuine affection for the whimsical irony that only real life can provide. “Well, that seems about par for the course, all right. As it turns out, I might never have fallen in love with _him_ without _you_.”

“Oh, I’m sure you would have warmed up to him over something else, eventually.”

“Probably one of his god-awful puns,” Hawkeye agrees.

“Or his ruggedly handsome face,” Peg says, teasingly.

“His competent medical procedure and alluring bedside manner.”

“His _fervent_ love of motorcycles.”

“His incredibly stupid hats.”

“Oh, or that _awful_ mustache,” Peg blurts out, before she can think to stop herself.

Hawkeye stares at her.

Peg covers her mouth with her hands for a moment before lowering them abruptly, gripping Hawkeye’s forearms. “Oh, god, Hawkeye, you _cannot_ tell him I just said that!”

A familiar and worrying gleam appears in the man’s eye. “But, Peg! That would go against the Triangle of Truth!”

“Hawkeye!”

Hawkeye considers her a long moment. “You really hate it?”

“BJ is my husband and I love every part of him, and I always will.” Peg closes her eyes in defeat. “But I hate it. It’s so _bristly_.”

Hawkeye’s laughter is not comforting. When she opens her eyes, she finds him grinning ear to ear. “I hate it, too! It’s a menace. It’s haunted me since the minute he grew it. It has to be stopped.”

Peg blinks. “Oh. Oh, no, Hawkeye, you’re not--.”

“And we have to stop it.”

\--

Hawkeye’s fiendish plan--which he calls Operation Barbershop--is genius in its simplicity. One morning, Hawkeye stumbles--blearily, as usual--down to the kitchen for his morning coffee. BJ looks up from his perusal of the newspaper to greet him, and his cheerful ‘good morning’ dies on his lips, replaced instead with an incredulous “Hawk, what the hell is _that_?”

‘That’ is a few days growth of a neatly shaped mustache, the spitting image of the one on BJ’s own upper lip. Hawkeye’s is a bit thinner and much grayer, to be sure, but the intent can’t be mistaken--the rest of his face is shaved smooth as silk, perhaps the closest shave he’s had in weeks.

Hawkeye, pretending to misunderstand BJ’s question, turns his head and looks behind him. Peg, who happens to re-enter the kitchen herself in that moment, blinks at the sudden scrutiny. She frowns, patting at her cheeks. “Oh, dear, do I have a smudge?” 

“Not that I can see,” Hawkeye assures her. “But BJ, apparently--.”

“Not _her_ ,” BJ interrupts, eyes swiveling from his wife to his friend’s mouth. “What is that on your face, Hawkeye?”

Hawkeye blinks, a slow and idle motion that reminds Peg viscerally of a cat. “Why, Beej. You should recognize it when you see it, I’d think. What’s the big deal? Yours looks so good, I thought I’d give it a go myself. Don’t you like it?”

Peg purses her lips and turns her attention to the bacon on the stove for fear of laughing outright at the conflicted look that crosses her husband’s face. BJ _does not_ like it, not one bit. But he’d never be so crass as to say so. At least...not yet. 

“It’s...different.”

Hawkeye grins at him and gleefully runs his fingers down over the bristles. Peg is positive that if this prank lasts long enough, he’ll end up with just enough growth to start twisting his mustache like a villain in a vaudeville performance. She can picture him already, twirling the ends and braying his best maniacal laugh. Desperately, Peg fakes a cough to cover a rising giggle.

“I’m glad you like it.”

“Sure I do,” BJ agrees, faintly. “I’m sure it’ll grow in great. Uh, Peg? What about you? How do you like Hawkeye’s new look?” His eyes beg for assistance in this matter, expecting with obvious certainty that she’ll lay down the law where he cannot.

Peg just smiles brightly at them both in turn. “Oh, I think it’s wonderful! My boys match!”

BJ actually _growls_ in muted frustration, rubbing at his mustache in accidental mimic of Hawkeye’s previous gesture. “Right. We match.”

Peg makes a mental note--just a _tiny_ one!--to be extra supportive and complimentary of Hawkeye’s new hirsutism over the next few days. If there’s one way to goad her husband into prompt and definite action, it’s appealing to his manly jealousy. She and Hawkeye work valiantly _not_ to trade knowing grins all during breakfast.

\--

It’s a bright and sunny Saturday morning--nearly two whole weeks later--when BJ comes down to the breakfast table as clean shaven as the younger, more jovial man she’d first met years ago in a rundown laundromat. She smiles at him warmly and gives his newly nude lips a firm kiss, but otherwise the entire thing goes without comment.

Hawkeye shaves his own mustache off that very afternoon, and if BJ ever realizes the trick that’s been pulled on him, he doesn’t mention it, and neither of the men adopt more than the stubble of the perpetually exhausted ever again.

Peg gives Hawkeye a warm, long embrace that night while they wait for BJ to finish tucking Erin in. 

“I love you,” she tells him, brightly.

Hawkeye snorts a laugh. “If I’d known that pulling one over on your husband would get me this kind of reception, I’d have started up the pranks again months ago.”

Peg rolls her eyes and wags a finger at him. “Whatever you do from this day forward is out of my hands. That was my one and only concession to the Hawkeye Effect, mister. Keep your shaving cream and superglue shenanigans far away from _me_ or there will be hell to pay.” Hawkeye raises his hands in defense. “Peg, please. Let’s forget I said anything. I miss the hugging.” Peg, obligingly, embraces him again, and when BJ finally pads out from the bathroom--staring at their exuberant hug with some confusion--she pulls him into it, too, and holds on very tight, overwhelmed with warm feelings of love. 

\--

Peg wakes abruptly in the middle of the night and feels an immediate sense of familiar dread. Between all of the psychology and prescriptions floating around their household, everyone’s mental state has been slowly but steadily improving. She can’t even remember the last time anyone’s nightmares had shattered the calm of the night. To be woken now to the dark silence of their bedroom seems a very ill omen, indeed.

“Hawkeye,” Peg yawns, as sympathetically as she can around her own deep exhaustion. She reaches out for him but then falls still in realization. It’s not Hawkeye that’s making a ruckus. And it’s not BJ, either.

“Erin,” Hawkeye says, sounding far more alert than Peggy feels. Before she can so much as process the tense, worried tone of his voice, he’s bounded off the bed and out the room. Peg tumbles out of the bed after him, tugging at the belt of her robe as she strides down the hall. After a beat, she hears BJ curse and follow after. They make a terrible, elephantine racket.

Peg comes to an abrupt halt in the doorway of Erin’s room. BJ rambs into her back, unseeing in the dim light, but then he stops and hovers in the threshold, too. Hawkeye sits on the edge of Erin’s small bed. He’s already turned on her bedside lamp, casting the room in warm glow and oddly friendly shadows. Erin, tearstained but smiling now, sits up against the pillowed satin of her pale pink headboard, nodding along quietly as Hawkeye speaks to her in a low whisper. Erin’s small hands grip the thinner, more calloused fingers of her odd friend. It’s one of only a handful of times Peg can remember Hawkeye touching their daughter of his own accord.

“Do you know the one about the coyote and the raven?” Hawkeye asks softly, the words only barely carrying to Peg’s attentive ears.

Erin shakes her head. “No. What happens?”

Hawkeye smiles wryly, “The same thing that always happens when two wily critters get together, I guess. See, it all started when the raven found himself a bunch of juicy, ripe grapes growing out from the barren stone….”

“I think we can leave them be,” BJ whispers, right up against her ear. The warmth of his breath makes her shiver.

“I want to listen,” Peg argues.

BJ tugs gently at the belt of her robe. “He needs this,” he says.

And that is, perhaps, the only possible sentiment that could drag her away from her daughter’s door in that moment. Together, Peg and BJ return to the warmth of their own bed--one party short, which feels quite strange, but in the name of a good cause.

The next morning when Peg goes down to the kitchen to start the coffee, she finds Hawkeye already there, pouring Erin a big glass of apple juice and telling her a joke in his Groucho Marx voice. 

“One morning, I shot an elephant in my pajamas--.”

“--How he got into my pajamas, I’ll never know,” Erin choruses along with him, trying and failing to echo the impression. Peg figures it would be difficult to mimic without familiarity with the source material. Maybe in a few years she’ll be old enough to appreciate the Marx brothers. Until then, Uncle Hawkeye’s bizarre antics will have to do.

“That’s right,” Hawkeye says approvingly as he turns to the toaster and fishes out two slices of rather overdone toast. Peg intercepts and takes the dark slabs onto her own plate as she tosses two fresh slices of bread into the machine and fiddles with the abused dials to correct them.

“Good morning,” Hawkeye greets. His eyes jump rather guiltily between Peg and Erin. “Erin didn’t want to go back to sleep last night, so I thought it’d be best if we got a jumpstart on breakfast rather than wake everyone else up.”

Peg kisses his cheek and is satisfied when all of the tension drains out of his shoulders at the touch. “Very thoughtful, thank you. I can finish up here, though. Erin, sweetheart, do you want jelly or butter?”

“Both!” Erin cheers, which causes Peg to roll her eyes. She’ll never forgive Hawkeye for teaching her daughter that the only _true_ way of enjoying toast is slathered with butter _and_ grape jam.

“Okay,” Peg sighs in agreement. “Hawkeye, did BJ pick up eggs the other day? I can’t find them in here anywhere.”

Hawkeye leans around her and deftly plucks the small box of eggs from the refrigerator door. “Ta-da!” he says, with a flourish.

“Thank you,” Peg says, and shoos him out of her way as she goes to scramble the whole dozen. Now that Hawkeye is on the mend and has gained a good deal of weight back, he’s putting a much smaller dent in the household grocery budget. That said, however, he can still put away fresh eggs at a rate that shocks and awes.

By the time BJ comes down to join them, the table groans with scrambled eggs and toast with all the possible fixings (being as Erin and Hawkeye prefer grape, Peg prefers peanut butter, and BJ won’t so much as look at a slab of toast anymore unless there’s honey to go with it). 

“Good morning, family.”

“Daddy!” Erin shouts in greeting. She waves jam-sticky fingers at him and asks, with obvious excitement, “Do you know the one about the coyote and the raven?”

BJ grins at Peg in a ‘there, you see? You get to hear it, after all’ manner and then shakes his head at his daughter. “Nope, can’t say I do.”

“Let me tell you it!” And Erin proceeds to jump feet first into her story. Based on Hawkeye’s expressions--which Peg monitors very closely--she doesn’t tell the tall tale _quite_ as it was recited to her the previous evening, but it must be close enough to suit, because as she declares “The End!” in a big, proud voice, Hawkeye nods in approval and even claps as Erin tries to stand on her chair and take a bow.

“Erin, sit on your bottom, please,” Peg corrects, gently, but she continues to smile.

From then on, any lingering awkwardness between Hawkeye and their daughter ceases to exist. Erin spends more time at home than at her grandparents’, and Hawkeye doesn’t hesitate at all to watch her on his own sans any supervision, when the situation demands. Little notes like “Hawkeye + Erin to library” and “Hawkeye + Erin park” appear more and more often under Hawkeye’s stretch of days on the calendar. Hawkeye starts walking Erin to and from school more often than not, as well. Perhaps, knowing this, it shouldn’t shock Peg as much as it does when--one day after school, as she picks Erin up as scheduled--she overhears Erin’s teacher, Ms. Monarch, asking after ‘your Uncle Hawkeye’ in a very particular way.

\--

“I can’t believe she actually called the house,” Peg says. She’s pacing. She knows she’s pacing, and she knows it makes her look aggravated and borderline panicky, but she does it all the same. If she tries to hold still during this conversation, she may very well explode from the sheer pressure of the anxiety building up in her chest. 

“Where else would she call?” BJ asks, reasonably. Boy does she hate how _reasonable_ he is being about all of this.

Peg whirls on him, frowning. “Aren’t you--don’t--doesn’t this--?” She sighs and throws up her hands, defeated by _words_ , the damn useless things.

BJ hums softly, mulling it over, putting his own words into careful order. This is something they learned together in marriage counseling. Seeing him so purposefully use the tactic now helps to ease some of Peg’s frantic worry. He’s only collected superficially because he’s _working_ at it. She could stand to take a page from his book.

Peg throws herself down on the couch beside her husband and takes a moment to practice one of Sidney Freedman’s breathing techniques. BJ watches her in silence and waits to speak until she’s opened her eyes once more. 

“From the moment I met him, Hawkeye had an eye for the nurses. And some of the men who came through, too, although I didn’t learn about that until later on. He attracts attention back. That’s not new.”

Peg nods. She understands this. Even careworn and twitching and as obviously _off_ as he’d been when they’d first returned to California, Hawkeye had often caught the eye of strangers on the street and in the stores. At the time, Peg had dismissed it as curiosity and maybe pity--she had determined that any odd overtones to such lingering glances were born of a relatable need to mother the poor, broken man. Now, she is forced to adjust her assumptions. Hawkeye is a dish, and people notice. She sighs and fiddles with her hands where they rest in her lap. She spins the simple band of her wedding ring around and around. “Will he--I mean, do you think--?” _Words_.

BJ picks up one of her hands and holds it warm and close between his own. “I don’t know,” he admits. “But I think that’s a decision he should be able to make for himself, don’t you?”

“How did you stand it?” Peg asks, ignoring the way the too-direct question makes her husband flinch slightly. “He said he kept--I mean, he, uhm.”

“Hawkeye had a few dates while he and I were involved,” BJ agrees, giving her the words she can’t put together, right now. She smiles at him in gratitude, even if what he says does nothing to put her at ease or alleviate any of her confusion.

“But didn’t you feel--?” 

“It’s part and parcel of who he is, Peg. It was odd for me, at first, but everything _about_ what Hawkeye and I had was odd. I adapted. We didn’t really...talk...about it much, at the time, but I understood and overall it just didn’t bother me. I knew what we had was strong enough to weather a few supply tent encounters. And Hawkeye’s never been anything but level-headed and safe, where those encounters are concerned.”

What BJ hadn’t expected, at the time, was that what he and Hawkeye had was also strong enough to weather even more than supply-tent trysts, like years of radio silence and an entire country’s worth of geographical distance. Peg’s glad for the strength of that love, now, considering where they all ended up. Even so, she isn’t sure that she can put that much faith in what _she_ and Hawkeye have built together, and the niggling worry prods relentlessly at her thoughts.

“You should talk to him about it. Well, you’ll have to, anyway, to deliver the phone message. But then we can all sit down and talk about it. Peg, for all you know, he’s not even interested in her.”

“I know,” she agrees, faintly. _Don’t borrow trouble_. But in this case, her trouble feels less borrowed and more assured. She’s seen Hawkeye and Ms. Monarch--Julia--together before, has watched them converse while Peg and Hawkeye waited for Erin to gather her things to leave. At the time, their obvious enjoyment of each other’s company hadn’t bothered Peg. She hadn’t seen it for what it was. Or maybe she had, but she had dismissed it out of hand, assuming that it was the type of playful flirtation Hawkeye had indulged in with Maddie so long ago--all in casual fun. 

“If he is,” Peg says, which causes BJ to sigh, though he remains attentive to her, regardless, “If he _is_...you’ll let him go? On a date, I mean.”

BJ nods. “I will. Peg, nothing means ‘Hawkeye is healing’ more to me than this. If he goes out, has fun, fools around a little, well...he’s gaining some ground back, you know what I mean?”

Peg goes back to spinning her ring. “He said he was a new Hawkeye, now.”

“He can be whoever he wants and still be part of this family.” BJ says that with such confidence and ease that Peg feels irrationally envious of him in that moment. BJ pauses, frowning at her in consideration. “Can’t he?”

Peg isn’t sure if she loves the old Hawkeye as much as the new one or not. She’s never really _met_ that other man, after all, except as a story her husband told her while living far away. “Of course,” she agrees, faintly. _Hawkeye is healing, and this proves it more than anything else._ What else can she possibly do, then, but agree? 

\--

Peg ties his tie for him before he goes. He’s still awful at it--his knots are too loose and sloppy, and if she lets him leave it like that, he’ll just fiddle with it all night and make a bad sartorial situation worse. 

“It won’t need to stay tied for long,” he jokes at her, waggling his eyebrows. She tries not to wince and forces a smile as she tightens the knot maybe a little _too_ tightly in response.

BJ, for his part, continues to sit quietly on the floor with Erin, offering no commentary of his own. The two have been working on a small puzzle between them for an hour while Hawkeye darts in and out of the closet in various outfits, seeking approval for each and every one (Erin had signed off on the first two or three with relish, but since then her attention has wavered considerably; Peg knows how she feels). Hawkeye turns and surveys himself in the mirror yet again, smoothing down his hair and tsking softly at the state of his cuffs. It’s a peacock-esque display that Peg has never seen from the man before and, she supposes, is probably some more of the Old Hawkeye shining through.

“You’ll be late,” Peg says, finally, out of sheer self-preservation, when Hawkeye threatens to start back at the beginning again with his own dove-gray ensemble. (Peg had shot that one down immediately. She refuses to send Hawkeye out with another woman while wearing the clothes that _she_ had picked out for him special during their early days in Chicago.)

BJ clears his throat softly. A recrimination, Peg knows. He doesn’t approve of her silence on this issue, doesn’t condone how she’s clearly chosen to just grin and bear it despite her reservations. But they’ve all learned a lot over the past several months. He won’t speak for her (or over her), either, or tattle about her feelings without her permission--for which she’s deeply grateful. 

She knows that they would all be better off if she would open up. Yet the phrase _Hawkeye is healing_ keeps running insistently through her head, and she simply cannot speak around the enormity of the thought and how it weighs heavily on her tongue.

She sends Hawkeye out into the world with a kiss on the cheek and a tentative “see you later?”

Hawkeye, blind to her distress, grins widely and tells them all not to wait up before he disappears off into the night in BJ’s car.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” BJ tells his departing back. Hawkeye’s returning laughter is light and carefree in a way that Peg has never heard before and would do anything, _anything_ to hear again, many times over, preferably in circumstances not remotely like these.

\--

Peg experiences a panic attack that night. She doesn’t recognize it as such, at first. It’s been a long while since her last one, after all, and it hits so suddenly and without warning that even if she had recognized it, she wouldn’t have been able to prepare.

She’s alone in the bathroom, washing her face before bed. BJ and Erin are in Erin’s room, running through the nightly ritual with practiced ease. A bedtime story (or two), a glass of water, a kiss, and then goodnight. 

Peg stands at the sink and isn’t thinking of much of anything except to notice the pervasive scent of their rose-oil soap and to recall how Julie Monarch smells strongly, always, of lavender and how odd it will be, later, to catch that foreign, lingering floral scent on Hawkeye’s clothes.

She ends up on the tile of the bathroom floor, body wedged between the sink and the closed door. She curls up on herself reflexively, as if the blows that fall internally are external, as if her thoughts are fists. Her fingers claw into her scalp, covering her ears to shield them against a non-sound, the white-noise static of her own blood thrumming through her veins. Every breath is like needles in her lungs, stabbing small and deep and leaving their stingers behind--like bees, then, to go with the swarms of butterflies in her churning stomach. Her entire body is convinced of danger and reacting accordingly.

She must make a sound. Or maybe it’s just that Erin is asleep, now, and BJ returns--as always--to Peg’s side after that task is complete. The bathroom door knob rattles above her head, accompanied by distant rumbling that Peg can only partially identify as BJ’s voice and only then because the context makes sense, even in her shattered state of mind.

True awareness returns, if slowly. She feels like no time at all has passed, but she’s been moved from the bathroom floor to their bed and the clock on the bedside table insists that it’s been nearly an hour since she last checked the time. 

Hawkeye is sitting on the other side of the bed, flipping through her borrowed copy of _The Heart is a Lonely Hunter_ with an abstracted expression on his face. His collar buttons are undone, and somewhere along the way he’s already discarded the tie.

Peg slowly unfurls herself from the tight hunch she’d adopted, arms looped around her legs and face pressed against her knees to block out the world. Hawkeye’s gaze flickers over to her at the motion, but the glance is brief and he says nothing as she pulls herself off the bed (her muscles twinge, sore from being held so tightly for so long) and pads into the bathroom to get a glass of water. She very carefully does not sniff the air for its hints of rose-oil soap, for fear of triggering another attack.

When she returns, Hawkeye has put the book on the bedside table (page carefully marked with its own dust jacket), and he adopts his usual graceless sprawl over half the bed, his arms folded behind his head so he can watch her approach. “I didn’t get dinner tonight,” he says, carefully neutral, without accusation. “You wanna join me for a snack?”

Peg considers this. “There’s leftover peach cobbler in the ‘fridge. I could make some tea.”

Hawkeye agrees readily to this suggestion and together they walk the quiet, dimly lit halls down to the kitchen.

“Where’s BJ?” 

Hawkeye points idly toward their never-used guest room. “Doing the Sleeping Beauty routine. He thought you and I should talk just the two of us, for now. I can wake him up, if you want.”

Peg would feel much better with BJ at her side, speaking for her, handling all of this potential conflict so she doesn’t have to. _Fear comes from uncertainty_ , she recalls. BJ has no uncertainty in this matter; he long ago accepted the reality of Hawkeye’s...dalliances. She’s the one who is afraid. BJ can’t speak for her, not if she truly wants her concerns expressed. “No. Let him sleep.”

They prepare their meal in silence. Peg snatches the kettle off the stove just before it starts to whistle. Hawkeye forgoes the noisy process of fetching the dessert plates and simply places the pie tin of cobbler in the middle of the table with two forks sticking out of it.

Peg curls her hands around the hot ceramic of her mug and watches the steam rise, seeing patterns in the twists and turns, watching it dance. 

Hawkeye, for his part, digs up a huge portion of fruit filling and flakey pastry onto his fork and gives it an idle sniff before cramming it all into his mouth with gusto. Peg sips at her too-hot drink and watches him eat for a few minutes.

“Am I supposed to start?” she asks, long after the once comfortable silence becomes as sticky and oppressive as an August night.

Hawkeye swallows thickly and puts his fork down. “You’re the one with something to say.”

Peg’s eyebrows draw in a frown and she dishes up a much more manageable mouthful of cold cobbler for want of some way to occupy her hands and mouth while she bullies her errant words into shapes that she finds acceptable, if not outright pleasing.

“I’m sorry I ruined your night,” she says, finally.

Hawkeye casts her a knowing look. “Are you?”

Peg shifts uncomfortably in her chair, fiddling idly with her fork, scraping the tines over a bit of detached crust stuck to the edge of the pie plate. “I’m sorry you didn’t get to enjoy your night,” she elaborates, “But I’m not sorry that you’re here instead of there, no.”

“You should have told me you didn’t want me to go. I could have talked to Julia properly, let her down easy. Now I’ve just cut and run before we even picked up the menus. You should have seen the look on her face. ‘Sorry, there’s been an emergency’ is one of the oldest dodges in the book. She thinks I’m a heel. And I feel like one, too.”

Peg grimaces and continues to avoid his eyes. “I didn’t mean to--.”

Hawkeye shakes his head. “Sorry. I don’t mean to make it sound like I’m angry that you had, uh--.” 

Peg rolls her eyes. She’s long past feeling awkward about the reality of her problems, or his. “You can call it what it is.”

“--a panic attack. That’s not your fault. I’m not mad I had to come back here; wild horses couldn’t have kept me away from you when you needed me. Never could. I just want to know, why didn’t you _say_ something?” 

She can feel his gaze, intent and perhaps slightly baffled, burning right through her. “I wanted you to have fun. I certainly didn’t want to be the one to keep you trapped here in your cage when you were finally ready to fly.”

Hawkeye, unseen, frowns at her phrasing. “I’m not _going_ anywhere. You know that, don’t you? A little pillow talk downtown isn’t going to send me packing. Julia--no, nevermind her. _I’m_ not looking for commitment. I already have that.”

“Do you _want_ that?” Peg retorts, unable to keep the bitterness at bay. She sneaks a peek at him and looks away again quickly, pained by the offense and hurt in his eyes. 

“If I didn’t want to be with you and BJ for the long haul, Peggy, you’d be the first to know. I love you both--all three of you, actually. Erin, too. You’re my family, now. I’ve done a lot of crummy things in my life, but running out on family isn’t one of them.”

Peg remembers Hawkeye’s mother. Caryle. Trapper John. No, Hawkeye isn’t the one who leaves. He knows all too well how much it hurts to be the one left behind. That’s what drew him to her, perhaps, in those early days in Chicago. Not just that she was BJ’s wife, but that she could recognize in Hawkeye a fellow abandoned soul.

“What is she giving you that we can’t?” Peg demands, because she’s been gnawing on the issue for days with no answer in sight. Because she promised herself she would be open and honest, now, no matter how much it hurts them both in the shorter term to do so.

Hawkeye reaches out and steals a bite of cobbler from her side of the plate, forcing her to look at him. He doesn’t eat the pastry. He just lets it linger on the fork as he speaks, capturing her eyes with his. “Everybody’s different. I can’t answer that for you the way you want me to. She’s herself. She isn’t like you. She isn’t like Beej. She isn’t like Sidney or Able or Decker or, uh, what was his name, Private Johnson or--.”

Peg holds up a hand. “I get the idea.”

Hawkeye smirks at her a bit. “I don’t think you do. Geez, Peg. You of all people ought to know what it’s like to be interested in more than one person.”

Peg shakes her head. “I’m afraid I don’t. I wish I did. I wish I understood it--you--better. But I can’t. I’m not _interested_ in you and BJ, Hawk. I’m in love with you both. And nobody else.”

“You once told BJ that he couldn’t put you and me in separate categories. That it isn’t a matter of choosing ‘Option A’ over ‘Option B.’ Why is this so different?”

“I...oh, I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m thinking.” 

Hawkeye, showing some of his usual dogged agitation, throws up his hands in defeat. Peg is glad the cobbler is sticky and therefore doesn’t fly off his fork and across the room. “You’re being hypocritical,” he accuses. “And, frankly, a lot more narrow minded than I’d expect; I’m disappointed in you.”

Peg flinches at the words--and his raised voice--as if struck. Hawkeye’s jittery anger banks almost as abruptly as it had risen. He sighs, letting his full fork drop down onto the pie plate. He rubs his hands over his face. “Sorry. I shouldn’t shout. And I shouldn’t call you names. And I shouldn’t make you feel guilty for having feelings,” he says, contrite. “You’ve just really thrown me for a loop, here. I thought we understood each other. You just--you were going to invite your friend Madeline to our _house_. I don’t see the difference.”

“I know. I don’t know.” Peg sighs. Introspection is so tiring. “I do care about Maddie. I’d like if it she could be a part of what we have, in whatever way she’d want to be. But I--I wanted her to come _here_. I wanted her to be a part of _us_.”

Hawkeye stares at her for a beat, a thoughtful look crossing his face. “What if I asked Julia to move in?”

Peg’s worried expression goes wry. “I think she might find that a bit sudden.”

“C’mon, Peg. Level with me. What if I went out with Julia with the understanding that she’d be coming over, sometimes. Spend time with you and Beej, too, however you’d want to. Stay for dinner. Maybe even stay the night--across the hall alone, probably. But maybe not. Maybe I’d be across the hall with her.” He pauses, his own expression wry, now. “You know, ‘committed.’”

Peg picks up her own fork and starts to segment small pieces off the main part of the cobbler, pushing each morsel into a tidy pile on the emptier side of the tin, a losing attempt to balance it out. “Ms. Monarch--Julia--is a very sweet person. She’s been wonderful with Erin. We’ve had coffee once or twice. To talk about Erin’s progress, mostly, but we chatted about other things, too. She’s an avid reader and has wonderful taste in books. I like her.”

Hawkeye’s barely smothered laugh draws Peg’s attention away from the distraction of the pie plate. She frowns at him. “What?”

“Peg! You’re a marvel. You never stop.”

“Stop _what_?” 

Hawkeye gestures to himself and then the whole of the kitchen. Or maybe the whole of world, Peg isn’t sure. “ _This_. Collecting people. Pulling them in from the cold. You’re _not_ upset about my tom-catting around. You’re not _jealous_ of Julia or probably anybody, really. You just hate feeling like somebody--anybody--is being left out of what we have, including yourself.”

Peg topples her tower of pastry over on its side, startled. “Oh.” She considers this insight for a while. The painful sight of Hawkeye’s retreating back, not knowing when he’ll come back. The stomach-churning thought of Hawkeye coming home with stories of Julia, lingering mementos of Julia, of a whole experience that he’s had out in the world on his own. Without Peg. Without BJ. Without _them_ as a unit, as a whole.

Peg blushes fiercely. She has just pictured something in her head bordering on extremely untoward. “I just want us to--mind you, I understand the importance of, of, uhm... _individualism_. But, well, we are...I mean, I consider us all to be a, a _package deal_ , you know?”

Hawkeye’s laugh is not restrained, now. “You felt left out.”

Peg puts her hands on her warm cheeks, deeply mortified. “Oh, Hawkeye, please don’t tease me.”

Hawkeye reaches out and gently pries her hands away from her face, holding her fingers in a lattice-work between his own. He gives her hands a squeeze. “I’m not trying to distance myself from what we have. This cute little Triangle we’ve built is as important to me as anybody.”

“You’re a grown person with his own life,” Peg counters, “It’s reasonable that you would have friends and interests that having nothing to do with BJ _or_ me.”

“Maybe,” Hawkeye agrees, “But there’s no reason I couldn’t bring my friends home to meet the family, from time to time. What’s the old phrase? ‘The more the merrier’?”

“They might get the wrong idea,” Peg hazards, uncertain. She pictures Julia Monarch sitting at their dining room table, drowning in their simple domesticity, wondering if wedding bells are Hawkeye’s intention for her, after all, if he’s brought her to this place to see Peg and BJ’s marriage as a template for her own future. 

“If there’s anything I’ve learned in the last few months, there’s a lot of problems that can be solved preemptively just by talking about it. I wouldn’t string anyone along. And I wouldn’t bring anyone home who wouldn’t understand, or, or be willing to participate as much as they’d feel comfortable with.” “People will talk,” Peg says, slowly. “The more people who come here--.”

“Let people talk. What do _people_ know? I’ll be careful. If I think anyone might blab too much to the wrong people, I won’t bring them here. Hell, I wouldn’t want to go out with them in the first place. I would never knowingly risk what we have on a whim, Peg.”

“I know that. Now, I know that, I mean. I’m sorry for not giving you enough credit. And I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you before. I just--I didn’t know why I was upset. And even if I had, I didn’t want to bother you. You were having so much _fun_ , Hawkeye.”

Hawkeye smirks. “I can have fun again,” he assures her. “In fact, if you’re feeling OK, I’d like to go call Julia’s line before it gets too late.”

Peg nods vigorously. “Yes, of course. And, uhm. Tell her I’m sorry for dragging you away. And maybe, if you want to, after you’ve gone out with her first, if you wanted to--?”

“Sure. I’ll tell her I make a mean pasta sauce and invite her over for dinner sometime when the whole family is around.”

Peg stands and goes to tidy up the table. She pauses, though, and snags Hawkeye’s arm as he goes to the phone. “You’re _certain_ she wouldn’t mind? She’s Erin’s teacher, Hawkeye. That could go very badly very quickly if she comes here and doesn’t like what she sees.”

Hawkeye’s eyes go soft and he sighs, pulling her into a loose hug. “You need to stop putting the whole weight of the world on your own shoulders, Atlas,” he murmurs into her hair. “I promise, I’ll get a good feel on things before I even so much as think of mentioning it. And if she doesn’t seem likely to oblige, I’ll break it off.”

“Oh! You shouldn’t have to--.”

“There are other fishes in the sea, Peg. She’s a sweet kid, but I’m not in love with her.”

Peg pulls back from the hug a little. “I can’t understand that. I wish I could,” she says, and really means it.So much of the puzzle that is Hawkeye would make sense, if she could only put herself in his shoes.

“You don’t have to. BJ doesn’t actually ‘get it’, either. The only person I ever met who really did was Trapper. And, hell, I don’t commend how he went about it. He snuck around long before the war and probably did for years after it. His wife’s actually a nice lady, you know. Not a saint herself by any means, but not a harpy, either. She didn’t deserve his bullshit.”

Peg smiles at him, raising an eyebrow. “They’re divorced now,” she says, airily. “We could give her a call. Invite _her_ over for dinner.”

Hawkeye’s laugh is so loud it brings BJ down from his nap. BJ yawns widely and smiles at the sight of the decimated pieces of cobbler in Peg’s hands. He plucks the plate from her grasp as she heads toward the fridge and then gestures toward Hawkeye with his chin. “Who’s he calling?”

“Julia.”

“Oh,” BJ says, drawing the simple word out as he perches against the kitchen counter and starts to devour the meager remains of the pastry. “To tell her ‘so long’?”

“To reschedule their date. And he might invite her over here, sometime, maybe, later on.”

BJ’s eyebrows lift. “Is that so?”

“We have some things to talk about--the three of us.”

BJ nods. “I figured. Everything’s OK for now, though?”

Peg kisses his cheek, standing on her bare tiptoes to reach. “Peachy keen.”

\--

Julia Monarch comes to dinner, after a while. She brings a bottle of very nice wine, a shiny new picture book for Erin, and a broad smile. She’s as polite and intelligent as Peg has always found her to be. When Hawkeye slips up halfway through the night and leans into BJ’s space in a manner that is anything but platonic, Julia doesn’t so much as bat an eye. Nobody discusses anything outright, and whenever Julia is around, Hawkeye keeps close to her and her alone. Despite this, the atmosphere is an easy one, and Peg feels more than assured by the end of the evening that all will be well and all personal business between them will stay exactly that--personal.

Julia comes and goes in the weeks that follow this initial testing of the waters. Sometimes she stays the night--always in the guest room, always with Hawkeye following like a puppy at her heels. They come down together as a duo to breakfast, Hawkeye bleary and Julia overwhelmingly perky in the way of all true morning people. Peg and Julia develop a routine of talking about Peg’s most recent readings for her classes over a cup of coffee and plates of eggs. BJ even throws in from time to time, though he’s not much of a reader of the classics. It’s domestic, it’s warm, and no one ever feels underappreciated or unacknowledged.

Somewhere along the way, Peg catches Hawkeye preening in the bathroom and asks: “Julia?”

And gets a shrug and a light, “No. Kyle.” in reply.

‘Kyle’ is a pharmacist from the city who works part time with Hawkeye’s hospital. They met at work and had several casual conversations before Hawkeye tempted fate and asked the man out for drinks. Hawkeye brings Kyle over to the house--with permission from Peg and BJ--after just a few weeks, explaining briefly that Kyle has another boyfriend in the city and everybody involved knows the score. 

Unlike when Julia visits, Hawkeye shows no restraint in his easy affections. He laughs at one of BJ’s jokes and emphasizes his amusement with a kiss. He carries on a conversation with Kyle about some new wonder drug while snuggling close with Peg on the couch, teasing the ends of her ponytail between his fingers. He holds Kyle’s hand during breakfast, thumb rubbing idly against Kyle’s own.

After several similar days together as a group, Kyle makes a few sly, joking advances BJ’s way, but BJ gently declines. Kyle shrugs amiably and suggests they all go out for ice cream, instead, and they do.

In between all of this, Julia continues to stay over. Then a small, snarky woman named Xin joins the roster. Then a gangly blonde with a sharp nose whom Hawkeye just calls “Jay,” who sometimes shows up in a summer dress and full makeup and sometimes shows up in a suit and tie, their longish gold locks slicked back and smooth. (BJ loves Jay the most, Peg is certain--largely because regardless of their current attire, they always arrive to dinner straddling a shiny BSA Road Rocket imported directly from Britain, and they aren’t shy about offering BJ a ride). There are others, and Peg and BJ get to know them all, though to varying degrees, and not always to Peg or BJ’s complete delight. (Peg and Xin especially do not get along--Peg finds the woman’s baseline demeanor too prickly, and she’s rarely kind to Erin; perhaps as a direct result, Xin only visits the house twice or so before she mysteriously disappears from Hawkeye’s rotation altogether).

One night, Peg is just putting the finishing touches on dinner (hamburgers and scalloped potatoes with a fruit pie keeping warm in the oven) when she turns to the dinner table and realizes that the extra chair at the table is missing an occupant. 

“Who’s coming to dinner?” she asks as Hawkeye enters the kitchen, a giggling Erin perched on his shoulder, holding on tightly to his head to stay seated. 

Hawkeye swings Erin gracefully to the floor. “Sorry, what? I had the knuckle of a small girl jammed into my ear.”

“Dinner,” Peg repeats, amused. “Who’s coming over? I’ve forgotten. I hope it’s not Mateo. It’s beef. He could just have the potatoes, I suppose. I could heat up the sprouts from last night.”

Hawkeye shakes his head. “Nobody.”

Peg blinks at him, confused. “ _Nobody_?”

Leaning over the kitchen island, Hawkeye plucks up several grapes from their bowl and pops them in his mouth. “I thought it’d be nice to just have dinner with the four of us. It’s been a while.”

Peg rapidly runs the last several nights through her mind. He’s right. Between breakfasts and lunches and dinners and brief meetings for coffee and the like with various guests, they haven’t had a day to themselves for at least a month. She can’t even recall the last time Hawkeye slept in _their_ shared bed, being always across the hall or staying out somewhere else.

“Oh,” Peg says, in a small voice. “Oh, that _would_ be nice.”

Hawkeye offers her a knowing smirk and leans even further over the island--he’s going to end up sprawled right over the top of the counter, at this rate--and pulls her toward him for a kiss. “You’re really something else, Peg Hunnicutt.”

Peg leans into the kiss and nearly falls right into the platter of hamburgers when her heels slip. She laughs, bracing herself against the counter and pushing Hawkeye back fully onto his own two feet. “You, too, Dr. Pierce.”

BJ wanders into the room at that time, still in the process of changing out of his work attire and into a more casual shirt. He pulls the tee-shirt down fully over his head and then blinks at the room at large. “Who’s coming to dinner? I forgot.”

Peg and Hawkeye share a glance and a smile. 

“Nobody,” Peg singsongs, brightly. “Tonight’s just us.”

“Just us?” BJ echoes, some of Peg’s earlier confusion mimicked in perfect similarity on his face.

“ _Yes_. Just us, us four, all of us, together, only us! You’re both impossible,” Hawkeye accuses, grabbing BJ’s wrist and tugging him down into his usual chair at the dinner table. “I’m starving. Let’s eat. Erin! Say the grace.”

Erin pauses in her reach for the potatoes and meets Hawkeye’s glance with a gleam in her eye. “ _The_ grace?”

“Yeah, the grace,” Hawkeye agrees, with a grin that puts Peg on immediate high alert.

Erin nods and settles back into her seat. Primly (and slowly) she folds her hands on the table before her and adopts an aura of pure angelic innocence. Peg sighs softly and braces herself as her sweet, darling child sings out in a bright, cheery tone:

“Lord, we know without a doubt, you'll bless this food as we pig out. Ayyyyymen.” 

“Ayyyyymen,” Hawkeye and BJ chorus together, snickering.

Peg rolls her eyes and serves Erin a healthy spoonful of the potatoes. “Meanwhile, mother dear will simply continue to pray for patience.”

“Good luck,” Hawkeye teases, giving Peg’s shin a gentle tap with his toe.

\--

Slowly but noticeably, the number of visits--overnight or otherwise--from Hawkeye’s paramours dwindles to a pace much less frenetic and overwhelming for all involved. While Peg and BJ are pleased to host the odd dinner or breakfast or coffee date, Peg at least would privately admit that her preference above all others are the quieter, surer days when it’s just the three of them and Erin around the table. She supposes it’s all a matter of settling in on Hawkeye’s part--once he realizes with certainty that his new status quo is assured and here to stay, he feels less obligated to gather his rosebuds all in one fell swoop.

Peg and Julia still share coffee and book talk once in a while, even on mornings when Hawkeye has the early shift and is nowhere in sight.

Jay stops by on scattered weekends and spends ages with BJ in the garage, tinkering with bits and pieces of an old, rusted bike BJ snatched up from an estate sale last summer and never managed to do much with on his own. 

Mateo picks Erin up from school when his schedule allows and will--to Erin’s delight--treat her to a “secret” ice cream before dropping her off with Peg or Hawkeye at home. Kyle, likewise--often with his partner in tow--enjoys picking Erin up from BJ’s care at the hospital in the city to take her out to special, grown-up events like the ballet or the newest film playing at the San Francisco theater, with popcorn and all the fixings. 

Hawkeye remains in the middle of this ever-expanding social circle, the common (but not always sole) thread between them all. 

“It’s a lot like the camp, actually,” BJ muses to Peg one late evening as they hover in the driveway, watching as Hawkeye and Julia drive off to dancing and drinks at a bar downtown. “Hawk always was the heart of that place, whether he wanted to be or not.”

“Was it the same in Crabapple Cove, do you think?” 

BJ considers this thought for a long, silent moment--remembering nightmares long put to rest, of dozens of childhood friends of Hawkeye’s rendered into situations of peril and the sheer terror those dreams had inspired in the man himself. “Yeah, actually. I think so.”

“He must miss them, too. Just as much as he missed your friends from the MASH.”

BJ hums softly in response, and Peg would assume her idle thought unnoticed and forgotten if not for the letters that start to appear in their mailbox, all addressed directly to BJ and all postmarked from Maine.

\--

Hawkeye’s second family reunion is markedly different than the first. For one thing, Peg approaches the event with much more latitude, no longer quite as prone to carrying the weight of everyone’s worlds on her shoulders alone. (Besides, the Crabapple Cove Community Soiree is BJ’s brainchild from start to finish--the only thing Peg has to do is arrive to the rented ballroom on time, and she accomplishes this task with ease).

Also, the nature of the conversations around the tables strike her as decidedly different than the sometimes crass and craggy language of the military and medical folks who had attended the previous Hawkeye Pierce Appreciation Party. As Peg circulates the room (she’s not _entirely_ able to remove herself from the thick of things, even now) and refreshes the odd cup of lemonade, she listens intently to tales of Dr. Daniel Pierce, his late wife, and their beloved only child. 

“She was an odd duck,” an older man with a big, red beard recounts to a clearly enraptured Mateo, who seems to delight in the man’s broad, New England accent more than the content of his stories alone. “In a good way, though. When she first came about to the Cove, the older ladies gave her some guff. Her being young and suspiciously unmarried and all, you see. But she won ‘em over before that first season was out. She had a way, is the thing. A sort of...magnetism. That’s where the boy got it, I figure. Ol’ Doc Pierce, he’s not exactly disagreeable himself, but what she had was...well, I wouldn’t put it past her to it being a sort of magic, the kind of whammy she put on those around her. And that kid, yeah. Yeah, he’s got it to, and has since the start. Why, I remember once when he wasn’t hardly knee-high to a post--”

“--Never expected him to stay with us long,” a tiny, bespectacled woman with flyaway white hair tells Peggy as she walks by, “Always knew he’d want bigger, better things than our little Maine town. Knew he’d get them, too. That’s why I always pushed him in my class, you know. He had such an aptitude for language, I’d really hoped he’d be a writer, not a doctor, even if all he ever wrote were silly jokes. He gets that from his father, you know. I swear, that man has--.”

“--And Old Doc Pierce turned right around and just about tipped the boat right over, I tell you. Would have been a pretty awful ending to an otherwise lovely proposal, to my mind. But knowing her, she’d not have minded. She was like that, really. Nothing phased her. Every minute of life was just a big joke, and she’d have liked to laugh herself silly if they _had_ fallen into the lake, I’d bet.”

Peggy finds Jay (in a suit and tie, today) and BJ together at a table with a group of other men, talking cars more than Pierces. She rolls her eyes affectionately and doesn’t linger there. Instead, she makes a beeline to the table in the middle of the room, where Hawkeye sits among an ever-shifting crowd. His laugh rings out, utterly distinctive, for the fifth or so time this hour alone. There’s nothing odd or strained about the sound at all. It’s like music to Peg’s ears, for all that it’s discordant and braying as ever. 

“You’re _kidding_ me!” Hawkeye hoots, clearly delighted. “He never told me that.”

The woman to whom Hawkeye speaks is about Peg’s own age. She has a spattering of freckles and bright, sparkling eyes. Her hand is very near Hawkeye’s knee, and Peg rolls her eyes again, though this time for a completely different reason. She hopes Hawkeye remembers that he’s promised this evening to the Hunnicutt house. Peg has an extra surprise for the man waiting at home, and she’d hate for him to miss it.

“It’s true!” the woman insists, laughing along with the rest of the table. “My daddy told me the story himself, and he was there. Along with half the town, probably. Nobody in their right mind was going to miss an event like that!”

“Geez, I’m sorry I wasn’t alive to see it.”

“Me, too,” the woman agrees, with a grin. 

Peg refills the woman’s empty cup and turns to go. The woman reaches out, though, and tugs gently at her arm. “Oh, please stay a minute! Hawkeye’s been telling us such great things about you and your husband, Mrs. Hunnicut. We’d love to chat.”

Peg feels her initial feelings toward the strange woman thaw significantly. “Oh, I don’t--.”

“C’mon, Peggy,” Hawkeye presses, his smile wide. “Sit and stay awhile. Have some lemonade.” He indicates the half-full pitcher in her hands and picks up an empty cup, giving it a little shake. 

Someone else at the table vacates a chair for her. She sits and spends the next several minutes trading names and shaking hands. There are least a dozen people--Hawkeye and herself included--squeezed around the borders of the table, elbows and hands flailing in conversation all around the circle. It’s chummy and warm and a tiny bit overwhelming. Hawkeye meets her eye and gives her a broad wink of solidarity. She feels the tiny tension in her shoulders disappear. 

“I _do_ have some questions,” Peg admits out loud. The table goes quiet, for a given definition of quiet. “You see, I’m _awfully_ curious about Hawkeye’s schooldays, and he’s so shy about it--.”

The freckled woman laughs outright. “Oh, sweetheart, have you ever come to the right people. Me and Fred and Delilah and Jack, here, we’re all graduates of Crabapple Cove High--half of Hawkeye’s graduating class, right here at the table. We’ll tell you anything you want to know!” 

“Oh, now, wait a second--!” Hawkeye protests, but he’s smiling, so he probably doesn’t mean it. 

“ _Anything_?” Peg jokes, innocently.

The freckled woman--Rebecca, Peg learns later--matches her conniving grin. “You bet. Let’s start with the fall of freshman year, huh? That’s the year that little Casanova, our very own Hawkeye Piece--came to the first day of school with the _worst_ attempt at facial hair I have _ever_ seen--.”

\--

Hawkeye offers Peg a hand out of the car. She takes it and finds herself immediately swept into a tight embrace, lifted right off her feet and swung around and around. She throws her head back in surprise, a combination of laughter and screech ringing out on the silent street around them. BJ comes along side of them and gently disengages Hawkeye’s arms from around his wife’s waist. Hawkeye laughs and proceeds to try and pick BJ up, too, resulting in a terrible parody of his earlier grace. Both men end up in a bizarre mutual headlock, instead, both laughing so hard they can barely breathe. A porch light goes on next door. Peg yelps and grabs both men by their shirts, tugging the whole lot of them inside the house. She shuts the door behind them and throws the lock with a snap. In the dark silence of the house, they all three pant for breath, their grins ever-present, if lost in the gloom. 

“That was the best night I’ve ever had,” BJ announces as Peg makes her cautious way to the light switch and throws the foyer into glorious glow. Hawkeye blinks owlishly against the light; he’s perhaps a bit more overtired than he’d like to let on.

“All you did all night was talk about engines and things,” Peg accuses her husband.

“I know,” BJ agrees. “And it was fun.”

Peg sighs dramatically but does not push the issue. “What about you, Hawkeye? Did you enjoy it?”

Hawkeye gives BJ’s arm a squeeze and then keeps holding on to the other man’s arm, using him as a balance beam while he kicks off his shoes and toes off his socks. He smiles up at Peg as he works. “You better believe it. I still don’t know how you managed. I swear, that was the entire town crammed into that ballroom, tonight.”

“Ah, no, see, that part wasn’t my doing,” BJ says, modestly. “I just sent out the invitations. _You’re_ the reason everyone RSVP’ed ‘yes.’”

“The Hawkeye Effect,” Peg agrees, somberly.

Hawkeye pads--barefoot now, as is his preference--across the living room and into the kitchen. He’s undoubtedly seeking out whatever might remain of BJ’s most recent pie. Peg, however, knows that his search will be for naught; Erin had the last piece for breakfast just that morning. “I still don’t want to know exactly what that means,” Hawkeye says, head lost to the depths of the ‘fridge.

Peg ducks around him and makes a beeline for the cat-shaped cookie jar on the counter. “Good, because I never intend to explain it to you. All the pie is gone. There’s chocolate chip in the cat, though, and about a half-gallon of vanilla in the freezer.”

Hawkeye obediently diverts his attention from the ‘fridge to the freezer, retrieving the ice cream and three large spoons. 

BJ watches them work with an amused expression, his eyes drifting once or twice to the clock. It’s well past midnight, now, and by rights they should all go straight to bed. Instead, it appears they’ll share a midnight feast. Such is the way in the Hunnicutt house.

Peg spoons a healthy portion of ice cream on the cookie in her hand and takes a massive, messy bite. Hawkeye eats his spoonful right out of the box and saves the cookies for later. BJ leaves the whole thing alone entirely and just watches with a soft expression around his eyes.

“Peg? Do you want me to go fetch the--?”

Peg bolts upright, half forgetting her mouth is full. She nearly sprays crumbs everywhere but catches herself in time, simply nodding her head in fervent agreement, instead, pressing her fingers to her lips. BJ smothers his answering grin and goes to get Hawkeye’s present from where it’s been hidden for weeks in the hall closet, on the top shelf, under a stack of old linens they never use. 

Peg swallows thickly and wipes her sticky lips off on a napkin. She doesn’t want to miss this moment, not even for cookies. 

Hawkeye blinks at her, vaguely suspicious. “What’s--?”

“You’ll see,” Peg assures him. Then, perhaps remembering that Hawkeye is not so keen on surprises, as of late-- “It’s just a little present.”

“Peg...you and Beej...this whole damn night, it’s really more than--.”

“Oh, shut up. It’s not _just_ a present for you, anyway. So don’t be so noble about it. _Honestly_.” It’s possible that Peg is a bit wound up by the excitement of the night and the sugar on her spoon. 

Hawkeye doesn’t take offense, though. He just laughs and pops another large bite of cookie into his mouth, not nearly as worried as Peggy about getting distracted by dessert. 

BJ returns in good time, his hands hidden behind his back, his lips quirked in a grin that--once upon a time--would have been hidden in the depths of his mustache. Hawkeye sits up straight at his arrival, obviously curious despite his casual dismissal of the present, before. 

At Peggy’s nod, BJ displays the small box with a flourish, handing it out toward Hawkeye’s own eager hands. “It’s kind of belated, in my opinion,” BJ says, “But Peggy wanted to get it just right, and I agreed.”

Hawkeye rips the thin paper away from the box with obvious glee--Peggy makes a mental note, just a tiny one, to give the man more small gifts just for the joy of watching him open them--and opens the velvet jewelry box with a snap.

Inside are three rings, carefully stacked. All are thick bands of bright white-silver platinum. Two are sized for a man’s fingers and otherwise rather plain, except for a swirl of intricate, engraved floral pattern threaded through each--it looks like a tangle of ivy to Hawkeye’s untrained eye. The third is smaller, thinner, and sporting both the embossed pattern and a single small diamond in a solitaire setting. The design strikes Hawkeye as vaguely familiar, and he realizes as he glances up at the two expectant pairs of eyes upon him that the bands are the spitting image of Peg and BJ’s wedding rings, but rendered in platinum instead of gold...and sporting an extra band, of course.

“It’s not very traditional, I know,” Peg says, uncertainly. “I feel like BJ should be on one knee. Or maybe both of us ought to.” She doesn’t move from her seat, however. 

Hawkeye blinks at them both and then turns his attention back to the black box in his hand. “It’s…” he pauses, reflecting some of Peggy’s uncertainty. “No one will eyes could fail to notice it, eventually, you know.”

Peg droops a bit, but BJ shrugs. “We know. We talked about that. We don’t mind, if you don’t.”

“And it’s all right if you don’t want to wear it...out. I know that could make it difficult, meeting your friends the way you do. We don’t want to make it awkward.” Peg’s words are said easily and genuinely. She resolved her feelings of confusion and abandonment over Hawkeye’s various paramours long ago. “I just wanted you to feel included.”

Hawkeye smiles slightly. “Yeah,” he agrees, softly, “I know you do. You always do.” He pulls the rings from the box and hands them over. Peg’s is easy to sort from the other two, and he needs only try on one of the men’s rings at random to determine that it’s not his size. He passes that one to BJ and then, after a moment of hesitation, slips on his own. It strikes Peg abruptly that he’s never worn a wedding ring, before. He maybe even never intended to, before she came along and pulled him into it. Despite that, the weight of it seems to feel right to him. He flexes his hand into a fist and back again and nods his satisfaction, smiling wider as he takes in the sight of the full set all at once. 

“I think we’ll have to hyphenate. I don’t want to be Hawkeye Hunnicutt, as pleasing as the alliteration might be on the ear,” Hawkeye jokes.

“Hello, this is the Hunnicutt-Pierce residence,” Peg tests, holding an imaginary phone to her cheek. 

“Of course, I could be Hawkeye Hunnicutt, and you could be Peg Pierce,” Hawkeye teases. “That’s not fair,” BJ argues. “What does that leave me?” Hawkeye snickers. “Well, last I heard, Ferretface is single again and looking, Mr. BJ Burns.”

BJ groans and rolls his eyes at them both and dismisses the conversation all together, turning his attention to cookies and rapidly melting ice cream, instead. Hawkeye tugs his ring off to get a better look at the design. For the first time,the additional engraving in the inside of the band catches his eye. Peg purposefully focuses her full attention on her own dessert as Hawkeye squints at the script scrawled around the length of the band: 

_But glory be! - there's a laugh to it._

Kipling, of course.

\--

Later, Peg finds the letter sitting--innocuous and unassuming--on her favorite reading chair. She’s alone in the house that morning. Erin is at school, Hawkeye is at the clinic, and BJ is in the city at the hospital. Everyone is exactly where they are schedule to be at exactly the time they are scheduled to be there, and Peg is at ease.

Her own block on the calendar is open, today. She has yet to decide what to do in it, and has started by tidying up the house in pieces, beginning with the living room, where the letter rests exactly as it was left--white and promising and bearing her name in a messy, doctorly scrawl with odd and scrunchy vowels. Hawkeye.

She opens the letter with a sense of unearned trepidation that quickly gives way to fond amusement as her eye scans the opening line.

_Dearest Peggy:_

_I thought it was time that I wrote to you as myself, for once. It’s what husbands do, isn’t it, when they are away from their wives? I’m only across town, right now, but I think it counts. Consider this the first of a new collection to add to your stash under the bed. Please tie these up in a ribbon, like the rest are--just no green, please. I’m sick of that color, even of the non-olive variety. Sadly, I don’t have any new stories to share, today. Every time I think I’ve come up with something interesting to write about, I remember that you were there when it happened--When Erin lost her tooth last week and BJ tried to tell her about the Tooth Fairy, and Erin decided that the Tooth Fairy uses children’s teeth to make toothpaste, and for days she refused to brush the teeth she has left; when I offered to make a cake for BJ’s birthday and it ended up raw in the middle so all the candles sunk clear through it, putting out the flames; when Radar called because his goat just had a kid and he wanted to know if Erin might want to keep it in the backyard and you_ almost _said yes; when Rebecca from Crabapple Cove sent over those boxes and boxes of yearbooks and we spent all night laughing at photos of me and the old gang._

_There’s not a part of my life, anymore, that you aren’t already a part of. It’s great, but it makes it hard to tell a good story, especially since I know you’d call me out for poetic license if I tried._

_So, I figured I’d write to you about something that happened in the past, instead. Something you weren’t there for and know nothing about. Nobody does, actually, except me._

_Once, in Chicago, I witnessed a real, actual miracle._

Peggy reads the rest of the letter with all the ravenous intent of a starving woman presented with a fine, five-course meal. She perches on the edge of the chair the whole time, hardly aware of her own body, she’s so absorbed in the words. It’s not just the content of the letter that ensnares her, though certainly it is engrossing enough. No, what pulls her in the most is the knowledge that finally, for the first time, she has Hawkeye’s words--genuine and unmasked--in her hands. It releases something unacknowledged in her, flooded her with a feeling of contentment and relief. 

A letter from a loved one, utterly precious. A letter, in which every word is an agony to craft, and every syllable soaked into the paper remains as eternal as the ink. Peggy had first learned of Hawkeye Pierce in a letter. She had fallen in love, a little, because of letters. And, now, his own words spread before her, line by line, and she can feel that familiar love spark into life again as if it is brand new. 

Peg hugs the pieces of paper to her chest when she’s done. She finds a winding length of purple ribbon in the depths of a drawer and cuts it into smaller pieces, wrapping the single folded stack of papers in a loose knot, ready for more to be added to the parcel later on. 

She has a feeling she’ll be glad of their larger bed for more reasons than one, with all the shoeboxes of pages that will doubtlessly accumulate under the mattress over time. 

“Hey, good-looking. _Now_ what’s cooking?” Hawkeyes asks, eyebrows raised as he leans in the doorway and watches Peg flit from stack to stack of untied papers. 

Peg looks up from the tornado of opened letters around her. She grins at him. “It’s all right. I’m just indulging in some well-earned nostalgia, today.” She waves the letter in her hand at him. “Do you think that baby goat Radar wanted to give us is a descendant of the one who wandered into your camp?”

Hawkeye considers this seriously. “I wouldn’t be surprised, actually. Rumor has it Radar had a lot of his animals shipped to Iowa in the weeks after he left. Klinger set it all up, so I’m sure most of ‘em got there in one piece.”

Peg smiles at him and at the letter, picking out squishy ‘a’s’ and violent, aggressive ‘u’s’ that look like ‘v’s’. 

“We do have a pretty big yard,” Hawkeye attempts, not for the first time, “And you know how much BJ hates mowing the lawn.”

Peg hums softly. “I can push the mower,” she says, dismissively, also not for the first time.

Hawkeye shrugs and tries a different track. “You know, every kid needs a dog.”

Peg looks up at that, curious. “Did you have a dog?”

He shrugs. “There were a few strays around town that sort of belonged to everyone. I may have named one or two.”

Peg hums again, but this time with more promise. “I had a dog. Two, actually. They were herders, for the farm, but they were my pets, too. Ellie, the older one, used to sleep at the foot of my bed.”

“We have a big backyard. Enormous, even.”

Peg starts to collect the letters into big piles. “We can talk about it tonight,” she decides. “But the dog will have to sleep with Erin. Our bed is crowded enough, don’t you think?”

Hawkeye’s grin is wide. “Deal.” He wanders into the room and sits beside her, helping her coordinate the piles of paper. He points at the single letter in its purple ribboned snare. “That took me hours, I hope you know. I haven’t hemmed and hawed over a letter that much since the first love letter I ever wrote.”

Peg looks up sharply, eyes bright with interest. “Ooh, tell me everything, immediately!” she demands. “Was it to Rebecca? Because, honestly, Hawkeye, you _must_ have kissed that woman at least once.”

Hawkeye laughs. “No. Not Rebecca. My attempt at growing a mustache our Freshman year really soured her on me, I think.”

Peg interlaces her fingers with Hawkeye’s, once all the letters are safety packed up once more. She listens to his story of letters and young romance, warm and content in a way that only magnifies the minute her other husband appears in their bedroom door.

“Hi, family,” BJ greets, as is his wont. Erin trails not far behind him, practically bouncing in her glee as she recounts to all and sundry a rousing tale of adventure and wonder that had occurred that morning on the playground, near the monkey bars. Hours later, they wrangle themselves up enough to trod down to the kitchen. Dinner comes together quickly with three sets of hands in the mix, and Erin only fusses a little bit at the chunks of mushroom that aren’t quite hidden enough in the depths of the ketchup-soaked meatloaf.

Hawkeye updates them all on the progress of one of his favorite veteran patients.

BJ talks with Hawkeye a while about a new research project he wants to explore, possibly in collaboration with Hawkeye’s clinic. Peg, utterly lost in all the medical talk, nods and smiles in the right places and spends most of her time making a mental list of all that will be required to properly care for a dog. 

They’ll adopt an older one, to start, she thinks. She doesn’t have the energy to keep up with any more energetic puppies than she already manages every day. 

As if to prove her point, Erin abruptly interrupts the doctor talk at the table by tossing a green bean at Hawkeye’s plate. It misses and hits him square in the face, instead. Hawkeye laughs, BJ snorts, and Peg sighs and wonders how many beans will be sacrificed in the name of retaliation, tonight.

As if sensing her thoughts, Hawkeye picks the thrown bean off of his knee and pops it in his mouth, keeping eye contact with Erin as his chews, the challenge clearly made. Erin frowns at him for a moment but then gives in, putting _two_ green beans in her mouth and chewing noisily, grimacing comically at the taste all the while. The stakes double at every pass until all of Erin’s vegetables have been consumed and Hawkeye is left in the dust, the loser (but the victor all the same). Peg makes sure to give him an especially large piece of pie for dessert that night in thanks. 

Hawkeye laughs knowingly as she passes the plate his way. “Adaptive parenting,” he says, warmly, and BJ laughs.

\--

It’s another book at its close for them all. Two prodigal children had left their family’s fold and returned again, now, wiser and stronger for the experience in many ways. There are times when Peg catches Hawkeye’s eye and they both look at BJ with trepidation, convinced he’ll be the next one to drift, the next one who will need to be reclaimed. BJ, however, remains largely unchanged in the ensuing years. He is, as ever, a steady presence, the touchstone of home. Over time, they all relax into new routines and cease jumping at shadows. Perhaps BJ had already been the Prodigal son years before. Perhaps he had left and returned in his journey to Korea and back again, transformation unnoticed. Perhaps he was, in fact, the first of them to go astray. 

Regardless, together, they settle and they grow--Erin, especially. Peg can hardly believe, sometimes, how tall and how smart and how brave and how strong their daughter has become, year by year. Neither BJ nor Hawkeye dare to pick her up in a glorious swing, any longer, for the sake of their aging backs. Instead, BJ takes to ruffling her hair as he passes by her, and Hawkeye often approaches her sneakily from behind, embracing her bodily in a crushing hug that makes Erin laugh and screech in mortified delight. 

Peg just holds her, sometimes, and is grateful for the opportunities while they last. 

The gray in Hawkeye’s hair is complete, now. Steel and white make a stark contrast to the boyish force of his toothy smile and the bright, eager light that sparks with increasing regularity in his eyes. The appearance of such youth and age in one is arresting, and Peggy grows used to watching passerby rake appreciative eyes over the man when they travel, _en masse_ , into town.

Eventually, BJ starts wearing reading glasses out of sheer necessity and sits alone in the evenings, buried in medical journals and letters sent from friends far away, the wire frames perched delicately on the end of his nose. He complains about getting old more than any of them, but Peg and Hawkeye only smile and ignore his whining, reminding him that, like wine, many things get better with age.

Peg takes note of the burgeoning fashions and one day, on a whim, has her fine blonde hair cut brutally short. She panics in the aftermath and hides her head in a hat, but she must eventually relinquish the garment when Erin questions her use of it indoors. Hawkeye swears in startled surprise and BJ nearly drops the plate he’s drying. The two men trade glances and Hawkeye is the first to break the baffled silence, turning his gaze back to Peg’s head with a thoughtful eye. “Interesting.”

“Audrey Hepburn,” BJ comments, equally thoughtful.

Peg pats her hair worriedly. “Oh, is it...is that a good thing?”

Hawkeye brays a short laugh. “Haven’t you ever seen Audrey Hepburn?” he retorts, amused. “Do you like it?”

Peg considers this. She hadn’t thought much about her own feelings in the ensuing panic. She turns to the oven and examines her reflection in the silver sides of the kettle on the stove. “...Yes,” she decides. “I think so.”

“Well, then. Sounds good to me,” Hawkeye shrugs. BJ wolf-whistles his agreement, and Peg blushes. 

Erin tilts her head, as thoughtful as any of them. “So, can I get my ears pierced?” she asks, and Peg sighs softly at the rapid march of time and obligingly steers her teenage daughter to the jewelry box in her bedroom to pick out a set she likes. Hawkeye retrieves sterile needles from his medical kit, and BJ follows hot on their heels, loudly fretting about infection until long after the deed is done and Erin’s earlobes sparkle with tiny beads of light.

\--

Erin names their dog Peanut Butter, and they call her PB for short. She’s an older dog with a gentle spray of white already forming in the ginger fur around her mouth, but she’d never had a name, before--at least, not one that anyone human ever knew. She takes to her new name and her new home like a duck to water, and she only chews up Hawkeye’s slippers once.

They do, eventually, also adopt Radar’s goat. Peg’s goat-milk fudge is the rage of every PTA meeting and lady’s luncheon, and though their lawn is never clipped exactly even, BJ is pleased as punch to sell the old push mower to a neighbor down the block. He pops the money into the big glass mason jar sitting on top of the ‘fridge, just above the family calendar. It has “vacation fund” written on it in big block letters with squishy ‘a’s. Peg has a feeling their first destination will be a tiny seaport town in Maine, and she sends Rebecca a slew of letters in preparation for the day.

\--

Erin’s first kiss is with a boy named Edward whom she meets at summer camp. (She tells Hawkeye all about it later, with a disappointed sigh--the night she returns home smelling of pine and craft glue. She complains about how Edward had mostly slobbered all over her face just like Peanut Butter, and it wasn’t nearly as pleasant as when the dog did it. Hawkeye, taken with the description, laughs so hard he nearly chokes to death on his cocoa. Eventually Erin laughs, too, bolstered by the familiar, familial bray.)

Her second kiss is with her redheaded best friend, Winifred, and that’s the one that sticks as her true “first.” In the years that follow, they all pretend the initial summer-camp kiss never happened, and everyone--Erin especially--is happier for it. 

Many years later, Peg gifts Erin the old, gold wedding bands, the plainer of the two sized smaller and inset with a new diamond to boot. Winnie doesn’t understand, exactly, why their rings match those of Erin’s three parents--but she doesn’t mind, either, and it pleases her how much the sight of the band on her finger makes Erin smile.

\--

The factories in Chicago start to close up shop as the age of local industry gives way to shinier, sleeker corporations. Madeline’s staff dwindles down to the dregs as her girls find new positions and (hopefully) bigger, brighter opportunities. 

Peg feels a sense of deja vu as she picks up the ringing phone and rolls out the line as far is it will go, perching out on the porch to afford herself and Maddie some privacy. She listens to her friend cry for only a few minutes before saying, firmly, “I’m sending you a ticket in the mail. We’ll see you soon.”

The guest bedroom has been empty for a while, now. Strangely, Peg feels more at ease with someone in it again, especially knowing that--for once--the occupant intends to stay...at least for a while, until something else comes along.

Peg greets Maddie every morning with a kiss on the cheek, and BJ and Hawkeye are never shy about pulling her into the odd, spontaneous hug, but that’s all that comes of that, and that’s okay.

Erin and Madeline and Winnie spend long afternoons together over the years as Erin starts thinking about things like prom and graduation and college and more. Madeline teaches both young women all that she can and helps them muddle through the things she can’t, and overall she’s pleased as punch that her time mentoring and mothering girls of a certain inclination is not at an end, after all.

They all call her Auntie M, and she cries tears of joy the first time she hears it.

\--

But all of that is later and, in the now, unknown.

For now, Peggy Hunnicutt runs a ribbon through her long, pale curls and ties them back just so. Her dress of vibrant, forest-green silk brings out the green in her eyes, and the string of pink pearls around her neck are understated in just the right way. She’s not certain if the pale color of the necklace can be properly replicated by the experts at Gilbert and Son’s Photography, but she hopes for the best. The other mothers at the PTA have loved the work of the small, family-run studio, and their portraits come highly recommended.

“The best part is how Mr. Gilbert works with the kids,” Winifred Whitmore’s mother had gushed, “I never thought we’d get anything decent out of our gaggle, what with Baby Charlie being so little and Nancy being so shy and Winnie being...Winnie, but he was a whiz at getting them all settled and photogenic. Really, Peg. You’ll love it.”

Peggy hadn’t had the heart to try and explain that it wasn’t Erin who’s attention she worries about. 

As if summoned by her thoughts, Hawkeye stumbles from the bathroom to the closet, running a comb blindly through his damp hair as he walks, his free hand reaching out to the clothing bag hanging from the closet door.

“That’s BJ’s,” Peg tells him, with a sigh.

Hawkeye pauses a moment and grabs the other black garment bag, instead. He lays it out with relative care on the bed and tosses his black plastic comb down on the nightstand with a soft clatter. Peg side-steps out of his reach, narrowly avoiding a wet hug.

“ _Hawk,_ ” she scolds.

“Sorry, sorry,” Hawkeye replies with an unrepentant grin. He holds his hands up in the universal sign of apology and steps back. “You just look too good not to touch.”

“Try to control yourself,” Peg deadpans. She checks the slim silver watch on her wrist and clucks softly. “BJ’s going to make us late.”

“You know he’s probably driving back as fast as he can.”

“That doesn’t actually put me at ease, strangely enough.”

Hawkeye frowns at her. “Hey. Are you OK?”

Peg moves as if to sit on the edge of the bed but then changes her mind, hyper-aware of the potential for wrinkles in her skirt. Bad enough that they’ll have to drive to the studio and sit for so long in the car. Maybe she should pack the iron….

“Peg,” Hawkeye says, taking the risk of snatching her hand in his own. “Hey. It’s going to go great. And if it doesn’t, we’ll just reschedule. I know this is important to you--.”

“--Extremely important,” Peg agrees.

“--So we’ll make it work. I promise. It’s going to be fun.” At her skeptical look, Hawkeye grins again. “I haven’t had anybody take my photo in ages. Not professionally, anyway. I look forward to having my handsome mug recorded for posterity.”

Peg’s shoulders relax. “Peacock,” she murmurs, moving closer to him, no longer quite as petrified of getting damp spots on her dress. She runs her free hand over his freshly-shaved cheek and lets the remains of her anxiety go in one big, blustery breath. “Okay.”

“Great. So, let me handle me, okay? I’m almost certain I remember how to buckle my own socks. Erin, on the other hand--.”

As if on cue, Erin’s high voice drifted down the hall, “Mommy, I want to wear my teddy-bear shirt!”

“Sweetheart,” Peg calls back, already halfway down the hall, “that’s your nightie! You can’t wear your nightgown for family pictures!”

\--

The portrait hangs on the mantel through the decades, catching the eye of every person who steps into their warm, welcoming living room. It’s not the best of the images they had been offered, not by a longshot, but it’s the one that they had all agreed on, in the end. BJ had smiled wide and shrugged his shoulders, unrepentant, at Peg’s cool stare. 

“You have to admit,” he said at the time, laughter clear in his voice, “it’s really...genuine.”

“It’s very ‘us,’” Hawkeye agreed, brightly. And Erin had, of course, followed along.

Outnumbered--and not _so_ against it, not really--Peg had surrendered. The photo had become one of many notable pieces of family legacy. Years and years later, Erin’s own child would stand on tiptoes in front of the hanging frame, pointing at the image of their mother and laughing up a storm.

In the photo, Erin pulls a gruesome, gargoyle face, pressing her nose up, pig-like with her fingertips. Behind her, Hawkeye blows out his cheeks in hamster-like rounds, his eyes decidedly crossed. On Erin’s other side, BJ catches sight of the dual grimaces and gets caught by the photographer mid laugh. Between the two men, hands cupped gently over her daughters shoulders, Peg stands, eyes rolled toward the Heavens, seeking grace and benediction that she will likely never find.

The plaque under the photo reads, simply, “The Hunnicutt-Pierce Family, (Finally) at Rest.” 


End file.
